
•^0..-.^* 



LIBRARY^F^N^REsa 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 




THE ROMANTIC ADVENTURE OF OLD SUN S WIFE 



(SEE PAGE 25) 



ON CANADA'S FRONTIER 



Shctcbc0 

OF HISTORY, SPORT, AND ADVENTURE 
AND OF THE INDIANS, MISSIONARIES 
FUR-TRADERS, AND NEWER SETTLERS 
OF WESTERN CANADA 



JULIAN RALPH 



ILLUSTRATED 




NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 

1892 



Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 

All rights reserved. 






r ^ 



TO 

THE PEOPLE OF CANADA 

THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR 

WHO, DURING MANY LONG JOURNEYS IN THE CANADIAN WEST 

WAS ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE TREATED WITH AN EXTREME 

FRIENDLINESS TO WHICH HE HERE TESTIFIES 

BUT WHICH HE CANNOT EASILY RETURN 

IN EQUAL MEASURE 



PREFACE 



If all those into whose hands this book may fall were as well in- 
formed upon the Dominion of Canada as are the people of the 
United States, there would not be needed a word of explanation of 
the title of this volume. Yet to those who might otherwise infer 
that what is here related applies equally to all parts of Canada, it is 
necessary to explain that the work deals solely with scenes and 
phases of life in the newer, and mainly the western, parts of that 
country. The great English colony which stirs the pages of more 
than two centuries of history has for its capitals such proud and 
notable cities as Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Halifax, and many oth- 
ers, to distinguish the progressive civilization of the region east of 
Lake Huron — the older provinces. But the Canada of the geogra- 
phies of to-day is a land of greater area than the United States ; it 
is, in fact, the " British America " of old. A great trans-Canadian 
railway has joined the ambitious province of the Pacific slope to the 
provinces of old .Canada with stitches of steel across the Plains. 
There the same mixed surplusage of Europe that settled our own 
West is elbowing the fur-trader and the Indian out of the way, and 
is laying out farms far north, in the smiling Peace River district, 
where it was only a little while ago supposed that there were but 
two seasons, winter and late spring. It is with that new part of Can- 
ada, between the ancient and well-populated provinces and the sturdy 
new cities of the Pacific Coast, that this book deals. Some refer- 
ences to the North are added in those chapters that treat of hunting 
and fishing and fur-trading. 

The chapters that compose this book originally formed a series of 



vi PREFACE 

papers which recorded journeys and studies made in Canada during 
the past three years. The first one to be published was that which 
describes a settler's colony in which a few titled foreigners took the 
lead ; the others were written so recently that they should possess 
the same interest and value as if they here first met the public eye. 
What that interest and value amount to is for the reader to judge, 
the author's position being such that he may only call attention to 
the fact that he had access to private papers and documents when 
he prepared the sketches of the Hudson Bay Company, and that, in 
pursuing information about the great province of British Columbia, 
he was not able to learn that a serious and extended study of its re- 
sources had ever been made. The principal studies and sketches 
were prepared for and published in Harper's Magazine. The spirit 
in which they were written was solely that of one who loves the open 
air and his fellow-men of every condition and color, and who has had 
the good-fortune to witness in newer Canada something of the old 
and almost departed life of the plainsmen and woodsmen, and of the 
newer forces of nation-building on our continent. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Titled Pioneers i 

II. Chartering a Nation ii 

III. A Famous Missionary . 53 

IV, Antoine's Moose- yard 66 

V. Big Fishing 115 

VI. "A Skin for a Skin" 134 

VII. "Talking Musquash" 190 

VIII. Canada's El Dorado 244 

IX. Dan Dunn's Outfit 290 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 



The Romantic Ad'naitiirc of Old Sun's IVife .... Frontispiece 

Dr. Rudolph Meyer's Place on the Pipestone 2 

Settler s Sod Cabin 3 

Whitewood, a Settlement on the Prairie 4 

Interior of Sod Cabin on the Frontier 5 

Prairie Sod Stable 7 

Trained Ox Team 9 

Indian Boys Running a Foot-race 31 

htdiatt Mother and Boy 36 

Opening of the Soldier Clan Dance 39 

Sketch in the Soldier Clan Dance 43 

A Fantasy from the Pony War-dance 47 

Thro'uing the Snoiu Snake 51 

Father Lacombe Heading the Indians 61 

The Hotel — Last Sign of Civilization 69 

"Give me a light" 73 

Antoine,from Life 79 

The Portage Sleigh on a Luniber Road 83 

The Track in the Winter Forest 87 

Pierre, from Life 91 

Antoine's Cabin 93 

The Camp at Night 97 

A Moose Bull Fight loi 

On the Moose Trail 103 

In Sight of the Game — "Now Shoot" 105 

Success 109 

Hunting the Caribou — "Shoot! Shoot/" iii 

Indians Hauling lYets on Lake Nepigon 119 

Trout-fishing Through the Ice 127 

Rival Traders Racing to the Indian Camp 1 37 

The Bear-trap 143 



X ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Huskie Dogs FigJiiing 147 

Painting the Robe 151 

Coureur dii Bois 159 

A Fur-trader in the Council Tepee 163 

Buffalo Meat for the Post 167 

The Indian Hunter of ly^o 171 

Indian Hunter Hafiging Deer Out of the Reach of Wolves . 173 

Making the Snow-shoe 177 

A Hudson Bay Man {Quarter-breed) 181 

The Coureur du Bois atid the Savage 185 

Talking Musquash 1 93 

Indian Hunters Moving Camp 198 

Setting a Mink-trap 201 

Wood Indians Come to Trade 205 

A Voyageur, or Canoe-man, of Great Slave Lake 209 

ht a Stiff Current 211 

Voyageur with Tumpline 217 

Voyageur s in Camp for the Night 221 

" Huskie " Dogs on the Frozen Highway 227 

The Factor s Fancy Toboggan 233 

Halt of a York Boat Brigade for the Night 239 

An Impression of Shuswap Lake, British Columbia . . . . 251 

The Tschummurn, or Tool Used in Making Canoes . . . . 257 

The First of the Salmon Run, Fraser River 261 

Indian Salmoji-fishing in the Thrasher . 266 

Going to the Potlatch — Big Canoe, North-west Coast .... 269 

The Salmon Cache 275 

An Ideal of the Coast 279 

The Potlatch 283 

An Indian Ca?ioe on the Columbia 293 

" Yoicre setting your nerves to stand it" 297 

Jack Kirkup, the Mountain Sheriff 299 

Engineer on the Preliminary Survey 303 

Falling Monarchs 308 

Da)i Dimn on His Works 311 

The Supply Train Over the Mountain 313 

A Sketch on the Work 317 

The Mess Tent at Alight . 319 

"They Gained Erectness by Slow Jolts" 322 



ON CANADA'S FRONTIER 



TITLED PIONEERS 



THERE is a very remarkable bit of this conti- 
nent just north of our State of North Dakota, 
in what the Canadians call Assiniboia, one of the 
North-west Provinces. Here the plains reach away 
in an almost level, unbroken, brown ocean of grass. 
Here are some wonderful and some very peculiar 
phases of immigration and of human endeavor. 
Here is Major Bell's farm of nearly one hundred 
square miles, famous as the Bell Farm. Here Lady 
Cathcart, of England, has mercifully established a 
colony of crofters, rescued from poverty and oppres- 
sion. Here Count Esterhazy has been experiment- 
ing with a large number of Hungarians, who form a 
colony which would do better if those foreigners were 
not all together, with only each other to imitate — 
and to commiserate. But, stranger than all these, 
here is a little band of distinguished Europeans, 
partly noble and pardy scholarly, gathered together 
in as lonely a spot as can be found short of the 
Rockies or the far northern regions of this continent. 




DR. RUDOLPH MEYER S PLACE 
PIPESTONE 



These gentlemen are Dr. Rudolph Meyer, of Berlin, 
the Comte de Cazes and the Comte de Raffignac, of 
France, and M. le Bidau de St. Mars, of that country 
also. They form, in all probability, the most dis- 
tinguished and aristocratic little band of immigrants 
and farmers in the New World. 

Seventeen hundred miles west of Montreal, in a 
vast prairie where settlers every year go mad from 
loneliness, these polished Europeans till the soil, 
strive for prizes at the provincial fairs, fish, hunt, 
read the current literature of two continents, and are 
happy. The soil in that region is of remarkable 
depth and richness, and is so black that the roads 
and cattle-trails look like ink lines on brown paper. 
It is part of a vast territory of uniform appearance, 
in one portion of which are the richest wheat-lands 



TITLED PIONEERS 3 

-of the continent. The Canadian Pacific Raihvay 
•crosses Assiniboia, with stops about five miles apart 
— some mere stations and some small settlements. 
Here the best houses are little frame dwellings ; but 
very many of the settlers live in shanties made of 
sods, with such thick walls and tight roofs, all of sod, 
that the awful winters, when the mercury falls to for- 
ty degrees below zero, are endured in them better 
than in the more costly frame dwellings. 

I stopped off the cars at Whitewood, picking that 
four-year-old village out at hap-hazard as a likely 
point at which to see how the immigrants live in a 
brand-new country. I had no idea of the existence 
of any of the persons I found there. The most per- 
fect hospitality is offered to strangers in such infant 
communities, and while enjoying the shelter of a mer- 
chant's house I obtained news of the distinouished 




SETTI.KR S SOD CABIN 



4 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

settlers, all of whom live away from the railroad in 
solitude not to be conceived by those who think their 
homes the most isolated in the older parts of the 
country. I had only time to visit Dr. Rudolph 
Meyer, five miles from Whitewood, in the valle}^ of 
the Pipestone. 







WHITEWOOD, A SETTLEMENT ON THE PRAIRIE 



The way was across a level prairie, with here and 
there a bunch of young wolf- willows to break the 
monotonous scene, with tens of thousands of gophers 
sitting boldly on their haunches within reach of the 
wagon whip, with a sod house in sight in one direc- 
tion at one time and a frame house in view at an- 
other. The talk of the driver was spiced with news 
of abundant wild-fowl, fewer deer, and marvellously 
numerous small quadrupeds, from wolves and foxes 
down. He talked of bachelors living here and there 
alone on that sea of grass, for all the world like men 



TITLED PIONEERS 



5 



in small boats on the ocean ; and I saw, contrariwise, 
a man and wife who blessed Heaven for an unheard- 
of number of children, especially prized because each 
new-comer lessened the loneliness. I heard of the 
long and dreadful winters when the snowfall is so 
light that horses and mules may always paw down 
to grass, though cattle stand and starve and freeze 
to death. I heard, too, of the way the snow comes 
in flurried squalls, in which men are lost within pis- 
tol-shot of their homes. In time the waoon came to 




INTERIOR OF SOD CAHIN ON TMK FRONTIER 



6 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

a sort of coulee or hollow, in which some mechanics- 
imported from Paris were putting up a fine cottage 
for the Comte de RafiBgnac. Ten paces farther, and 
I stood on the edge of the valley of the Pipestone, 
looking at a scene so poetic, pastoral, and beautiful 
that in the whole transcontinental journey there 
were few views to compare with it. 

Reaching away far below the level of the prairie 
was a bowl-like valley, a mile long and half as wide, 
with a crystal stream lying like a ribbon of silver 
midway between its sloping walls. Another valley,, 
longer yet, served as an extension to this. On the 
one side the high grassy walls were broken with fre- 
quent gullies, while on the other side was a park-like 
growth of forest trees. Meadows and fields lav be- 
tween, and nestling against the eastern or grassy 
wall was the quaint, old-fashioned German house of 
the learned doctor. Its , windows looked out on 
those beautiful little valleys, the property of the doc- 
tor — a little world far below the great prairie out of 
which sportive and patient Time had hollowed it. 
Externally the long, low, steep-roofed house was Ger- 
man, ancient, and picturesque in appearance. Its 
main floor was all enclosed in the sash and glass 
frame of a covered porch, and outside of the walls of 
glass were heavy curtains of straw, to keep out the 
sun in summer and the cold in winter. In-doors the 
house is as comfortable as any in the world. Its 
framework is filled with brick, and its trimmings are 
all of pine, oiled and varnished. In the heart of the 
house is a great Russian stove — a huge box of brick- 
work, which is filled full of wood to make a fire that 



A '\ 




^V.V. 




PRAIRIE SOD STABLE 



is made fresh every day, and that 
heats the house for twenty -four 
hours. A well-filled wine-cellar, a 
well-equipped library, where Har- 
per's Weekly, and Uder Land 
2ind Mer, Punch, Puck, and Die Fliegende Blatter 
lie side by side, a kindly wife, and a stumbling baby, 
tell of a combination of domestic joys that no man is 
too rich to envy. The library is the doctor's work- 
shop He is now engaged in compiling a digest of 
the economic laws of nations. He is already well 
known as the author of a History of Socialism (in 
Germany, the United States, Scandinavia, Russia, 
France, Belgium, and elsewhere), and also for his 
History of Socialism in Germany. He writes in 
French and German, and his works are published in 
Germany. 



8 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

Dr. Meyer is fift3^-three years old. He is a politi- 
cal exile, having been forced from Prussia for con- 
nection with an unsuccessful opposition to Bismarck. 
It is because he is a scholar seeking rest from the 
turmoil of politics that one is able to comprehend his 
living in this overlooked corner of the world. Yet 
when that is understood, and one knows what an Ar- 
cadia his little valley is, and how complete are his 
comforts within-doors, the placidity with which he 
smokes his pipe, drinks his beer, and is waited upon 
by servants imported from Paris, becomes less a mat- 
ter for wonder than for congratulation. He has 
shared part of one valley with the Comte de Raffig- 
nac, who thinks there is nothing to compare with it 
on earth. The count has had his house built near 
the abruptly-broken edge of the prairie, so that he 
may look down upon the calm and beautiful valley 
and enjoy it, as he could not had he built in the 
valley itself. He is a youth of very old French fam- 
ily, who loves hunting and horses. He was contem- 
plating the raising of horses for a business when I 
was there. But the count mars the romance of his 
membership in this little band by going to Paris 
now and then, as a young man would be likely to. 

Out-of-doors one saw what untold good it does to 
the present and future settlers to have such men 
among them. The hot-houses, glazed vegetable beds, 
the plots of cultivated ground, the nurseries of young 
trees — all show at what cost of money and patience 
the Herr Doctor is experimenting with every tree 
and flower and vegetable and cereal to discover what 
can be grown with profit in that region of rich soil 



TITLED PIONEERS 9 

and short summers, and what cannot. He is in com- 
munication with the seedsmen, to say nothing of the 
savants, of Europe and this country, and whatever he 
plants is of the best. Near his quaint chvelHng he 
has a house for his gardener, a smithy, a tool-house, 
a barn, and a cheese-factory, for he makes gruyere 
cheese in great quantities. He also raises horses 
and cattle. 

The Comte de Cazes has a sheltered, favored claim 
a few miles to the northward, near the Ou' Appele 
River. He lives in great comfort, and is so success- 
ful a farmer that he carries off nearly all the prizes 
for the province, especially those given for prime 
vegetables. He has his wife and daughter and one 
of his sons with him, and an abundance of means, 
as, indeed, these distinguished settlers all appear to 
have. 






^^4M 



- > 




tbjvixed ox team 



lO ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

These men have that faculty, developed in all edu- 
cated and thinking souls, which enables them to ban- 
ish loneliness and entertain themselves. Still, though 
Dr. Meyer laughs at the idea of danger, it must have 
been a little disquieting to live as he does during the 
Riel rebellion, especially as an Indian reservation is 
close by, and wandering red men are seen every day 
upon the prairie. Indeed, the Government thought 
fit to send men of the North-west Mounted Police to 
visit the doctor twice a week as lately as a year af- 
ter the close of the half-breed uprising. 



II 

CHARTERING A NATION 

HOW it came about that we chartered the Black- 
foot nation for two days had better not be told 
in straisfhtforward fashion. There is more that is in- 
teresting in going around about the subject, just as in 
reality we did go around and about the neighborhood 
of the Indians before we determined to visit them. 

In the first place, the most interesting Indian I 
ever saw — among many kinds and many thousands 
— was the late Chief Crowfoot, of the Blackfoot peo- 
ple. More like a king than a chief he looked, as he 
strode upon the plains, in a magnificent robe of 
white bead-work as rich as ermine, with a gorgeous 
pattern illuminating its edges, a glorious sun worked 
into the front of it, and many artistic and chromatic 
figures sewed in gaudy beads upon its back. He 
wore an old white chimney-pot hat, bound around 
with eagle feathers, a splendid pair of chaperajos, all 
worked with beads at the bottoms and fringed along 
the sides, and bead-worked moccasins, for which any 
lover of the Indian or collector of his paraphernalia 
would have exchanged a new Winchester rifle with- 
out a second's hesitation. But though Crowfoot was 
so royally clothed, it was in himself that the kingly 
quality was most apparent. His face was extraordi- 
narily like what portraits we have of Julius Ccesar, 



12 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

with the difference that Crowfoot had the complexion 
of an Egyptian mummy. The high forehead, the 
great aquiHne nose, the thin Hps, usually closed, the 
small, round, protruding chin, the strong jawbones, 
and the keen gray eyes composed a face in which 
every feature was finely moulded, and in which the 
warrior, the commander, and the counsellor were 
strongly suggested. And in each of these roles he 
played the highest part among the Indians of Canada 
from the moment that the whites and the red men 
contested the dominion of the plains until he died, a 
short time ago. 

He was born and lived a wild Indian, and though 
the orood fathers of the nearest Roman Catholic mis- 
sion believe that he died a Christian, I am constrained 
to see in the reason for their thinking so only another 
proof of the consummate shrewdness of Crowfoot's 
life-long policy. The old -king lay on his death-bed 
in his great wig-a-wam, with twenty-seven of his med- 
icine-men around him, and never once did he pretend 
that he despised or doubted their magic. When it 
was evident that he was about to die, the conjurers 
ceased their long-continued, exhausting formula of 
howling, drumming, and all the rest, and, Indian-like, 
left Death to take his own. Then it was that one of 
the watchful, zealous priests, whose lives have indeed 
been like those of fathers to the wild Indians, slipped 
into the great tepee and administered the last sacra- 
ment to the old pagan. 

" Do you believe T' the priest inquired. 

" Yes, I believe," old Crowfoot grunted. Then he 
whispered, " But don't tell my people." 



CHARTERING A NATION 



13 



Among the last words of great men, those of Sa- 
ponaxitaw (his Indian name) may never be recorded, 
but to the student of the American aborigine they 
betray more that is characteristic of the habitual atti- 
tude of mind of the wild red man towards civilizin<r 
influences than any words I ever knew one to utter. 

As the old chief crushed the bunch-2:rass beneath 
his gaudy moccasins at the time I saw him, and as 
his lesser chiefs and headmen strode behind him, we 
who looked on knew what a great part he was bear- 
ing and had taken in Canada. He had been chief of 
the most powerful and savage tribe in the North, and 
of several allied tribes as well, from the time when 
the region west of the Mississippi was terra incognita 
to all except a few fur traders and priests. His war- 
riors ruled the Canadian wilderness, keeping the 
Ojibbeways and Crees in the forests to the east and 
north, routinor the Crows, the Stonies, and the Bio-- 
Bellies whenever they pleased, and yielding to no 
tribe they met except the Sioux to the southward 
in our territory. The first white man Crowfoot 
ever knew intimately was Father Lacombe, the noble 
old missionary, whose fame is now world-wide among 
scholars. The peaceful priest and the warrior chief 
became fast friends, and from the day when the white 
men first broke down the border and swarmed upon 
the plains, until at the last they ran what Crowfoot 
called their "fire-wagons" (locomotives) through his 
land, he followed the priest's counselling in most im-^ 
portant matters. He treated with the authorities, 
and thereafter hindered his braves from murder, 
massacre, and warfare. Better than that, during the 



14 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

Riel rebellion he more than any other man, or twenty 
men, kept the red man of the plains at peace when 
the French half-breeds, led by their mentally irrespon- 
sible disturber, rebelled against the Dominion author- 
ities. 

When Crowfoot talked, he made laws. While he 
spoke, his nation listened in silence. He had killed 
as many men as any Indian warrior alive ; he was a 
mighty buffalo-slayer; he was torn, scarred, and man- 
gled in skin, limb, and bone. He never would learn 
English or pretend to discard his religion. He was 
an Indian after the pattern of his ancestors. At 
eighty odd years of age there lived no red -skin who 
dared answer him back when he spoke his mind. 
But he was a shrewd man and an archdiplomatist. 
Because he had no quarrel with the whites, and be- 
cause a grand old priest was his truest friend, he gave 
orders that his body should be buried in a coffin. 
Christian fashion, and as I rode over the plains in the 
summer of 1890 I saw his burial-place on top of a 
high hill, and knew that his bones were guarded 
night and day by watchers from among his people. 
Two or three days before he died his best horse was 
slaughtered for burial with him. He heard of it. 
" That was wrong," he said ; " there was no sense in 
doing that ; and besides, the horse was worth good 
money." But he was always at least as far as that. 
in advance of his people, and it was natural that 
not only his horse, but his gun and blankets, his 
rich robes, and plenty of food to last him to the 
happy hunting-grounds, should have been buried 
with him. 



CHARTERING A NATION 1 5 

There are different ways of judging which is the 
best Indian, but from the stand-point of him who 
would examine that distinct product of nature, the 
Indian as the white man found him, the Canadian 
Blackfeet are among if not quite the best. They are 
almost as primitive and natural as any, nearly the 
most prosperous, physically very fine, the most free 
from white men's vices. They are the most reason- 
able in their attitude towards the whites of any who 
hold to the true Indian philosophy. The sum of 
that philosophy is that civilization gets men a great 
many comforts, but bundles them up with so many 
rules and responsibilities and so much hard work 
that, after all, the wild Indian has the greatest 
amount of pleasure and the least share of care that 
men can hope for. That man is the fairest judge of 
the red -skins who considers them as children, gov- 
erned mainly by emotion, and acting upon undisci- 
plined impulse ; and I know of no more hearty, natu- 
ral children than the careless, improvident, impulsive 
boys and girls of from five to eighty years of age 
whom Crowfoot turned over to the care of Three 
Bulls, his brother. 

The Blackfeet of Canada number about two thou- 
sand men, women, and children. They dwell upon a 
reserve of nearly five hundred square miles of plains 
land, watered by the beautiful Bow River, and almost 
within sight of the Rocky Mountains. It is in the 
province of Alberta, north of our Montana. There 
were three thousand and more of these Indians when 
the Canadian Pacific Railway was built across their 
hunting-ground, seven or eight years ago, but they 



i6 ON Canada's frontier 

are losing numbers at the rate of two hundred and 
fifty a year, roughly speaking. Their neighbors, the 
tribes called the Bloods and the Piegans, are of the 
same nation. The Sarcis, once a great tribe, be- 
came weakened by disease and war, and many years 
ago begged to be taken into the confederation. 
These tribes all have separate reserves near to one 
another, but all have heretofore acknowledged each 
Blackfoot chief as their supreme ruler. Their old 
men can remember when they used to roam as far 
south as Utah, and be gone twelve months on the 
war-path and on their foraging excursions for horses. 
They chased the Crees as far north as the Crees 
would run, and that was close to the arctic circle. 
They lived in their war-paint and by the chase. Now 
they are caged. They live unnaturally and die as 
unnaturally, precisely like other wild animals shut up 
in our parks. Within their park each gets a pound 
of meat with half a pound of flour every day. Not 
much comes to them besides, except now and then a 
little game, tobacco, and new blankets. They are so 
poorly lodged and so scantily fed that they are not 
fit to confront a Canadian winter, and lung troubles 
prey among them. 

It is a harsh way to put it (but it is true of our own 
government also) to say that one who has looked the 
subject over is apt to decide that the policy of the 
Canadian Government has been to make treaties with 
the dangerous tribes, and to let the peaceful ones 
starve. The latter do not need to starve in Canada, 
fortunately; they trust to the Hudson Bay Company 
for food and care, and not in vain. Having treated 



CHARTERING A NATION I7 

with the wilder Indians, the rest of the policy is to 
send the brightest of their boys to trade-schools, and 
to try to induce the men to till the soil. Those who 
do so are then treated more generously than the 
others. I have my own ideas with which to meet 
those who find nothing admirable in any except a 
dead Indian, and with which to discuss the treatment 
and policy the live Indian endures, but this is not the 
place for the discussion. Sufiice it that it is not to 
be denied that between one hundred and fifty and 
two hundred Blackfeet are learning to maintain sev- 
eral plots of farming land planted with oats and po- 
tatoes. This they are doing with success, and with 
the further result of setting a good example to the 
rest. But most of the bucks are either sullenly or 
stupidly clinging to the shadow and the memory of 
the life that is gone. 

It was a recollection of that life which they por- 
trayed for us. And they did so with a fervor, an 
abundance of detail and memento, and with a splen- 
dor few men have seen equalled in recent years — or 
ever may hope to witness again. 

We left the cars at Gleichen, a little border town 
which depends almost wholly upon the Blackfeet and 
their visitors for its maintenance. It has two stores 
— one where the Indians get credit and high prices 
(and at which the red men deal), and one at which 
they may buy at low rates for cash, wherefore they 
seldom go there. It has two hotels and a half-dozen 
railway men's dwellings, and, finally, it boasts a tiny 
little station or barracks of the North-west Mounted 
Police, wherein the lower of the two rooms is fitted 



1 8 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

with a desk, and hung with pistols, guns, handcuffs, 
and cartridge belts, while the upper room contains the 
cots for the men at night. 

We went to the store that the Indians favor — just 
such a store as you see at any cross-roads you drive 
past in a summer's outing in the country — and there 
were half a dozen Indians beautifying the door-way 
and the interior, like magnified majolica-ware in a 
crockery-shop. They were standing or sitting about 
with thoughtful expressions, as Indians always do 
when they go shopping; for your true Indian gener- 
ates such a contemplative mood when he is about to 
spend a quarter that one would fancy he must be the 
most prudent and deliberate of men, instead of what 
he really is — the greatest prodigal alive except the 
negro. These bucks might easily have been mistaken 
for waxworks. Unnaturally erect, with arms folded 
beneath their blankets, they stood or sat without 
moving a limb or muscle. Only when a new-comer 
entered did they stir. Then they turned their heads 
deliberately and looked at the visitor fixedly, as eagles 
look at you from out their cages. They were strap- 
ping fine fellows, each bundled up in a colored blank- 
et, flapping cloth leg-gear, and yellow moccasins. 
Each had the front locks of his hair tied in an up- 
right bunch, like a natural plume, and several wore 
little brass rings, like baby finger-rings, around certain 
side locks down beside their ears. 

There they stood, motionless and speechless, wait- 
ing until the impulse should move them to buy what 
they wanted, with the same deliberation with which 
they had waited for the original impulse w^hich sent 



CHARTERING A NATION I9 

them to the store. If Mr. Frenchman, who kept the 
store, had come from behind his counter, EngHsh 
fashion, and had said : " Come, come ; what d'you 
want ? Speak up now, and be quick about it. No 
lounging here. Buy or get out." If he had said 
that, or anything hke it, those Indians would have 
stalked out of his place, not to enter it again for a 
very long time, if ever. Bartering is a serious and 
complex performance to an Indian, and you might as 
well try to hurry an elephant up a gang-plank as try 
to quicken an Indian's procedure in trading. 

We purchased of the Frenchman a chest of tea, a 
great bag of lump sugar, and a small case of plug to- 
bacco for orifts to the chief. Then we hired a buck- 
board wagon, and made ready for the journey to the 
reserve. 

The road to the reserve lay several miles over the 
plains, and commanded a view of rolling grass land, 
like a brown sea whose waves were petrified, with 
here and there a group of sickly wind-blown trees to 
break the resemblance. The road was a mere wagon 
track and horse-trail through the grass, but it was 
criss-crossed with the once deep ruts that had been 
worn by countless herds of buffalo seeking water. 

Presently, as we journeyed, a little line of sand-hills 
came into view. They formed the Blackfoot ceme- i/ 
tery. We saw the " tepees of the dead " here and 
there on the knolls, some new and perfect, some old 
and weather-stained, some showing mere tatters of 
cotton flapping on the poles, and still others only 
skeleton tents, the poles remaining and the cotton 
covering gone completely. We knew what we would 



20 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

see if we looked into those " dead tepees " (being care- 
ful to approach from the windward side). We would 
see, lying on the ground or raised upon a framework, 
a bundle that would be narrow at top and bottom, 
and broad in the middle — an Indian's body rolled up 
in a sheet of cotton, with his best bead-work and 
blanket and gun in the bundle, and near by a kettle 
and some dried meat and corn-meal against his feel- 
ing hungry on his long journey to the hereafter. As 
one or two of the tepees were new, we expected to 
see some family in mourning ; and, sure enough, when 
we reached the great sheer-sided gutter which the 
Bow River has dug for its course through the plains, 
we halted our horse and looked down upon a lonely 
trio of tepees, with children playing around them and 
women squatted by the entrances. Three families 
had lost members, and were sequestered there in ab- 
ject surrender to grief. 

Those tents of the mourners were at our feet as we 
rode southward, down in the river gully, where the 
grass was green and the trees were leafy and thriv- 
ing; but when we turned our faces to the eastward, 
where the river bent around a great promontory, 
what a sight met our gaze ! There stood a city of 
tepees, hundreds of them, showing white and yellow 
and brown and red against the clear blue sky. A si- 
lent and lifeless city it seemed, for we were too far 
off to see the people or to hear their noises. The 
great huddle of little pyramids rose abruptly from the 
level bare grass against the flawless sky, not like one 
of those melancholy new treeless towns that white 
men are building all over the prairie, but rather like 



CHARTERING A NATION 21 

a mosquito fleet becalmed at sea. There are two 
camps on the Blackfoot Reserve, the North Camp 
and the South Camp, and this town of tents was be- 
tween the two, and was composed of more households 
than both together; for this was the assembling for 
the sun-dance, their greatest religious festival, and 
hither had come Bloods, Piegans, and Sarcis as well 
as Blackfeet. Only the mourners kept away ; for 
here were to be echoed the greatest ceremonials of 
that dead past, wherein lives dedicated to war and to 
the chase inspired the deeds of valor which each 
would now celebrate anew in speech or song. This 
was to be the anniversary of the festival at which the 
young men fastened themselves by a strip of flesh in 
their chests to a sort of Maypole rope, and tore their 
flesh apart to demonstrate their fitness to be con- 
sidered braves. At this feast husbands had the right 
to confess their women, and to cut their noses off if 
they had been untrue, and if they yet preferred life to 
the death they richly merited. At this gala-time 
sacrifices of fingers were made by brave men to the 
sun. Then every warrior boasted of his prowess, and 
the young beaus feasted their eyes on gayly-clad 
maidens the while they calculated for what number 
of horses they could be purchased of their parents. 
And at each recurrence of this wonderful holiday- 
time every night was spent in feasting, gorging, and 
gambling. In short, it was the great event of the 
Indian year, and so it remains. Even now you may 
see the young braves undergo the torture ; and if you 
may not see the faithless wives disciplined, you may 
at least perceive a score who have been, as well as 



22 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

hear the mighty boasting, and witness the dancing, 
garni ngi and carousing. 

We turned our backs towards the tented field, for 
we had not vet introduced ourselves to Mr. Masrnus 
Begg, the Indian agent in charge of the reserve. We 
were soon within his of^cial enclosure, where a pretty 
frame house, an of^ce no bigger than a freight car, 
and a roomy barn and stable were all overtopped by 
a central fiag-staff, and shaded by flourishing trees. 
Mr. Begg was at home, and, with his accomplished 
wife, welcomed us in such a hearty manner as one 
could hardly have expected, even where white folks 
were so "mighty unsartin " to appear as they are on 
the plains. The agent's house without is like any 
pretty village home in the East ; and within, the 
only distinctive features are a number of ornamental 
mounted wild-beast's heads and a room whose walls 
are lined about with rare' and beautiful Blackfoot 
curios in skin and stone and bead-work. But, to our 
joy, we found seated in that room the famous chief 
Old Sun. He is the husband of the most remarkable 
Indian squaw in America, and he would have been 
Crowfoot's successor were it not that he was eighty- 
seven years of age when the Blackfoot Caesar died. 
As chief of the North Blackfeet, Old Sun boasts the 
largest personal following on the Canadian plains, 
having earned his popularity by his fighting record, 
his commanding manner, his eloquence, and by that 
generosity which leads him to give away his rations 
and his presents. No man north of Mexico can 
dress more gorgeously than he upon occasion, for 
he still owns a buckskin outfit beaded to the value 



CHARTERING A NATION 23 

of a Worth gown. Moreover, he owns a red coat, 
such as the Government used to give only to great 
chiefs. The old fellow had lost his vigor when we 
saw him, and as he sat wrapped in his blanket he 
looked like a half-emptied meal bag flung on a chair. 
He despises English, but in that marvellous VolapUk 
of the plains called the sign language he told us 
that his teeth were gone, his hearing was bad, his 
eyes were weak, and his flesh was spare. He told 
his age also, and much else besides, and there is no 
one who reads this but could have readily under- 
stood his every statement and sentiment, conveyed 
solely by means of his hands and fingers. I noticed 
that he looked like an old woman, and it is a fact 
that old Indian men frequently look so. Yet no one 
ever saw a young brave whose face suggested a 
woman's, though their beardless countenances and 
long hair might easily create that appearance. 

Mr. Remington was anxious to paint Old Sun and 
his squaw, particularly the latter, and he easily ob- 
tained permission, although when the time for the 
mysterious ordeal arrived next day the old chief was 
greatly troubled in his superstitious old brain lest 
some mischief would befall him through the medium 
of the painting. To the Indian mind the sun, which 
they worship, has magical, even devilish, powers, and 
Old Sun developed a fear that the orb of day might 
" work on his picture " and cause him to die. Fort- 
unately I found in Mr. L'Hereux, the interpreter, a 
person who had undergone the process without dire 
consequences, was willing to undergo it again, and 
who added that his father and mother had submitted 



24 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

to the operation, and yet had lived to a yellow old 
age. When Old Sun brought his wife to sit for her 
portrait I put all etiquette to shame in staring at her, 
as you will all the more readily believe when you 
know something of her history. 

Old Sun's wife sits in the council of her nation — 
the only woman, white, red, or black, of whom I have 
ever heard who enjoys such a prerogative on this 
continent. She earned her peculiar privileges, if any 
one ever earned anything. Forty or more years ago 
she was a Piegan maiden known only in her tribe, 
and there for nothing more than her good origin, her 
comeliness, and her consequent value in horses. She 
met with outrageous fortune, but she turned it to 
such good account that she was speedily ennobled. 
She was at home in a little camp on the plains one 
day, and had wandered away from the tents, when 
she was kidnapped. It was in this wise : other 
camps were scattered near there. On the night 
before the day of her adventure a band of Crows 
stole a number of horses from a camp of the Gros 
Ventres, and very artfully trailed their plunder tow- 
ards and close to the Piegan camp before they turned 
and made their way to their own lodges. When the 
Gros Ventres discovered their loss, and followed the 
trail that seemed to lead to the Piegan camp, the girl 
and her father, an aged chief, were at a distance from 
their tepees, unarmed and unsuspecting. Down 
swooped the Gros Ventres. They killed and scalped 
the old man, and then their chief swung the young 
girl upon his horse behind him, and binding her to 
him with thongs of buckskin, dashed off triumphantly 



CHARTERING A NATION 2$ 

for his own village. That has happened to many 
another Indian maiden, most of whom have behaved 
as would a plaster image, saving a few days of weep- 
ing. Not such was Old Sun's wife. When she and 
her captor were in sight of the Gros Ventre village, 
she reached forward and stole the chief's scalping- 
knife out of its sheath at his side. With it, still wet 
with her father's blood, she cut him in the back 
through to the heart. Then she freed his body from 
hers, and tossed him from the horse's back. Leaping 
to the ground beside his body, she not only scalped 
him, but cut off his right arm and picked up his gun, 
and rode madly back to her people, chased most of 
the way, but bringing safely with her the three great- 
est trophies a warrior can wrest from a vanquished 
enemy. Two of them would have distinguished any 
brave, but this mere village maiden came with all 
three. From that day she has boasted the right to 
wear three eagle feathers. 

Old Sun was a young man then, and when he 
heard of this feat he came and hitched the requisite 
number of horses to her mother's travois poles 
beside her tent. I do not recall how many steeds 
she was valued at, but I have heard of very high- 
priced Indian girls who had nothing except their 
feminine qualities to recommend them. In one case 
I knew that a young man, who had been casting 
what are called " sheep's eyes " at a maiden, went one 
day and tied four horses to her father's tent. Then 
he stood around and waited, but there was no sign 
from the tent. Next day he took four more, and so 
he went on until he had tied sixteen horses to the 



26 ON Canada's frontier 

tepee. At the least they were worth $20, perhaps 
$30, apiece. At that the maiden and her people 
came out, and received the young man so graciously 
that he knew he was " the young woman's choice," 
as we say in civilized circles, sometimes under very 
similar circumstances. 

At all events. Old Sun was rich and powerful, and 
easily got the savage heroine for his wife. She was 
admitted to the Blackfoot council without a protest, 
and has since proven that her valor was not sporadic, 
for she has taken the war-path upon occasion, and 
other scalps have gone to her credit. 

After a while we drove over to where the field lay 
littered with tepees. There seemed to be no order in 
the arrangement of the tents as we looked at the 
scene from a distance. Gradually the symptoms of a 
great stir and activity were observable, and we saw 
men and horses running about at one side of the 
nomad settlement, as well as hundreds of human 
figures moving in the camp. Then a nearer view 
brought out the fact that the tepees, which were of 
many sizes, were apt to be white at the base, reddish 
half-way up, and dark brown at the top. The smoke 
of the fires within, and the rain and sun without, 
paint all the cotton or canvas tepees like that, and 
very pretty is the effect. When closer still, we saw 
that each tepee was capped with a rude crown 
formed of pole ends — the ends of the ribs of each 
structure ; that some of the tents were gayly orna- 
mented with great geometric patterns in red, black, 
and yellow around the bottoms; and that others bore 
upon their sides rude but highly colored figures of 



CHARTERING A NATION 2/ 

animals — the clan sign of the family within. Against 
very many of the frail dwellings leaned a travois, the 
triangle of poles which forms the wagon of the Ind- 
ians. There were three or four very large tents, 
the headquarters of the chiefs of the soldier bands 
and of the head chief of the nation ; and there was 
one spotless new tent, with a pretty border painted 
around its base, and the figure of an animal on cither 
side. It was the new establishment of a bride and 
groom. A hubbub filled the air as we drew still 
nearer; not any noise occasioned by our approach, 
but the ordinary uproar of the camp— the barking of 
dogs, the shouts of frolicking children, the yells of 
young men racing on horseback and of others driv- 
ing in their ponies. When we drove between the 
first two tents we saw that the camp had been sys- 
tematically arranged in the form of a rude circle, 
with the tents in bunches around a great central 
space, as large as Madison Square if its corners were 
rounded off. 

We were ushered into the presence of Three Bulls, 
in the biggest of all the tents. By common consent 
he was presiding as chief and successor to Crowfoot, 
pending the formal election, which was to take place 
at the feast of the sun -dance. European royalty 
could scarcely have managed to invest itself with 
more dignity or access to its presence with more 
formality than hedged about this blanketed king. 
He had assembled his chiefs and headmen to greet 
us, for we possessed the eminence of persons bearing 
gifts. He was in mourning for Crowfoot, who was his 
brother, and for a daughter besides, and the form of 



28 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

expression he gave to his grief caused him to wear 
nothing but a flannel shirt and a breech -cloth, in 
which he sat with his big brown legs bare and 
crossed beneath him. He is a powerful man, with 
an uncommonly large head, and his facial features, all 
generously moulded, indicate amiability, liberality, 
and considerable intelligence. Of middle age, smooth- 
skinned, and plump, there was little of the savage in 
his looks beyond what came of his long black hair. 
It was purposely wore unkempt and hanging in his 
eyes, and two locks of it were bound with many 
brass rings. When we came upon him our gifts had 
already been received and distributed, mainly to 
three or four relatives. But though the others sat 
about portionless, all were alike stolid and statuesque, 
and whatever feelings agitated their breasts, whether 
of satisfaction or disappointment, were equally hid- 
den by all. 

When we entered the big tepee we saw twenty- 
one men seated in a circle against the wall and facing 
the open centre, where the ground was blackened by 
the ashes of former fires. Three Bulls sat exactly 
opposite the queer door, a horseshoe -shaped hole 
reaching two feet above the ground, and extended 
by the partly loosened lacing that held the edges of 
the tent-covering together. Mr. L'Hereux, the in- 
terpreter, made a long speech in introducing each of 
us. We stood in the middle of the ring, and the 
chief punctuated the interpreter's remarks with that 
queer Indian grunt which it has ever been the cus- 
tom to spell " ugh," but which you may imitate ex- 
actly if- you will try to say " Ha " through your nose 



CHARTERING A NATION 29 

while your mouth is closed. As Mr. L'Hereux is a 
great talker, and is of a poetic nature, there is no 
telling what wild fancy of his active brain he in 
vented concerning us, but he made a friendly talk, 
and that was what we wanted. As each speech 
closed, Three Bulls lurched forward just enough to 
make the putting out of his hand a gracious act, yet 
not enough to disturb his dignity. After each salu- 
tation he pointed out a seat for the one with whom 
he had shaken hands. He announced to the council 
in their language that we were good men, whereat 
the council uttered a sino;le " Ha" throusfh its twentv- 
one noses. If you had seen the rigid stateliness of 
Three Bulls, and had felt the frigid self-possession of 
the twenty-one ramrod-mannered under-chiefs, as well 
as the deference which was in the tones of the other 
white men in our company, you would comprehend 
that we were made to feel at once honored and sub- 
ordinate. Altogether we made an odd picture : a 
circle of men seated tailor fashion, and my own and 
Mr. Remington's black shoes marring the gaudy ring 
of yellow moccasins in front of the savages, as they 
sat in their colored blankets and fringed and be- 
feathered gear, each with the calf of one leg crossed 
before the shin of the other. 

But L'Hereux's next act after introducing us was 
one that seemed to indicate perfect indifference to the 
feelings of this august body. No one but he, who 
had spent a quarter of a century with them in closest 
intimacy, could have acted as he proceeded to do. 
He cast his eyes on the ground, and saw the mounds 
of sugar, tobacco, and tea heaped before only a cer- 



30 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

tain few Indians. " Now who has done dose t'ing?" 
he inquired. " Oh, dat vill nevaire do 'tall. You 
haf done dose t'ing, Mistaire Begg.'* No.-^ Who 
den .f* Chief .f* Nevaire mind. I make him all rount 
again, vaire deeferent. You shall see somet'ing." 
With that, and yet without ceasing to talk for an 
instant, now in Indian and now in his English, he 
began to dump the tea back again into the chest, 
the sugar into the bag, and the plug tobacco in a 
heap by itself. Not an Indian moved a muscle — 
unless I was right in my suspicion that the corners 
of Three Bulls' mouth curved upward slightly, as if 
he were about to smile, " Vot kind of wa-a-y to do-o 
somet'ing is dat.'*" the interpreter continued, in his 
sing-song tone. "You moos' haf one maje-dome 
[major-domo] if you shall try satisfy dose Engine." 
He always called the Indians " dose Engine." " Dat 
chief gif all dose present to his broders und cousins, 
vhich are in his famille. Now you shall see me, vot 
I shall do." Taking his hat, he began filling it, now 
with sugar and now with tea, and emptying it before 
some six or seven chiefs. Finally, when a double 
share was left, he gave both bag and chest to Three 
Bulls, to whom he also gave all the tobacco. " Such 
tam-fool peezness," he went on, " I do not see in all 
my life. I make visitation to de free soljier chief 
vhich shall make one grand darnce for dose gentle- 
men, und here is for dose soljier chief not anyt'ing 
'tall, vhile everything was going to one lot of beggaire 
relation of T'ree Bull. Dat is what I call one tam- 
fool way to do somet'ing." 

The redistribution accomplished. Three Bulls wore 



CHARTERING A NATION 



33 



a grin of satisfaction, and one chief who had lost a 
great pile of presents, and who got nothing at all by 
the second division, stalked solemnly out of the tent, 
through not until Three Bulls had tossed the plugs 
of tobacco to all the men around the circle, precisely 
as he might have thrown bones to dogs, but always 
observing a certain order in making each round with 
the plugs. All were thus served according to their 
rank. Then Three Bulls rummaged with one hand 
behind him in the grass, and fetched forward a great 
pipe with a stone bowl and wooden handle — a sort 
of chopping-block of wood — and a large long-bladed 
knife. Taking a plug of tobacco in one hand and the 
knife in the other, he pared off enough tobacco to fill 
the pipe. Then he filled it, and passed it, stem fore- 
most, to a young man on the left-hand side of the tepee. 
The superior chiefs all sat on the right-hand side. 
The young man knew that he had been chosen to 
perform the menial act of lighting the pipe, and he 
lighted it, pulling two or three w^hiffs of smoke to 
insure a good coal of fire in it before passing it back 
— through why it was not considered a more menial 
task to cut the tobacco and fill the pipe than to light 
it I don't know. 

Three Bulls puffed the pipe for a moment, and 
then turning the stem from him, pointed it at the 
chief next in importance, and to that personage the 
symbol of peace was passed from hand to hand. 
When that chief had drawn a few whiffs, he sent the 
pipe back to Three Bulls, who then indicated to 
whom it should go next. Thus it went dodging 
about the circle like a marble on a bagatelle board. 



34 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

When it came to me, I hesitated a moment whether 
or not to smoke it, but the desire to be polite out- 
weighed any other prompting, and I sucked the pipe 
until some of the Indians cried out that I was " a 
good fellow." 

While all smoked and many talked, I noticed that 
Three Bulls sat upon a soft seat formed of his 
blanket, at one end of which was one of those wicker- 
work contrivances, like a chair back, upon which In- 
dians lean when seated upon the ground. I noticed 
also that one harsh criticism passed upon Three 
Bulls was just; that was that when he spoke, others 
might interrupt him. It was said that even women 
"talked back" to him at times when he was harang- 
uing his people. Since no one spoke when Crowfoot 
talked, the comparison between him and his prede- 
cessor was injurious to him ; but it was Crowfoot 
who named Three Bulls for the chieftainship. Be- 
sides, Three Bulls had the largest following (under 
that of the too aged Old Sun), and was the most 
generous chief and ablest politician of all. Then, 
again, the Government supported him with whatever 
its influence amounted to. This was because Three 
Bulls favored agricultural employment for the tribe, 
and was himself cultivating a patch of potatoes. He 
was in many other ways the man to lead in the new 
era, as Crowfoot had been for the era that was past. 

When we retired from the presence of the chief, I 
asked Mr. L'Hereu.^ how he had dared to take back 
the presents made to the Indians and then distribute 
them differently. The queer Frenchman said, in his 
indescribably confident, jaunty way : 



CHARTERING A NATION 35 

" Why, dat is how you mus' do \Vid dose Engine. 
Nevaire ask one of dose Engine anyt'ing, but do 
dose t'ing which are right, and at de same time make 
explanashion what you are doing. Den dose Engine 
can say no t'ing 'tall. But if you first make explana- 
shion and den try to do somet'ng, you will find one 
grand trouble. Can you explain dis and dat to one 
hive of de bees ? Well, de hive of de bee is like 
dose Engine if you shall talk widout de promp' 
action." 

He said, later on, " Dose Engine are children, and 
mus' not haf consideration like mans and women." 

The news of our generosity ran from tent to tent, 
and the Black Soldier band sent out a herald to cry 
the news that a war-dance was to be held immedi- 
ately. As immediately means to the Indian mind 
an indefinite and very enduring period, I amused my- 
self by poking about the village, in tents and among 
groups of men or women, wherever chance led me. 
The herald rode from side to side of the enclosure, 
yelling like a New York fruit peddler. He was 
mounted on a bay pony, and was fantastically cos- 
tumed with feathers and war-paint. Of course every 
man, woman, and child who had been in-doors, so to 
speak, now came out of the tepees, and a mighty 
bustle enlivened the scene. The worst thinor about 

O 

the camp was the abundance of snarling cur-dogs. 
It was not safe to walk about the camp without a 
cane or whip, on account of these dogs. 

The Blackfeet are poor enough, in all conscience, 
from nearly every stand-point from which we judge 
civilized communities, but their tribal possessions in- 




INDIAN MOTHER AND BOY 



elude several horses to each head of a family ; and 
though the majority of their ponies would fetch no 
more than $20 apiece out there, even this gives them 
more wealth per capita than many civilized peoples 
can boast. They have managed, also, to keep much 
of the savage paraphernalia of other days in the form 
of buckskin clothes, elaborate bead-work, eagle head- 
dresses, good guns, and the outlandish adornments of 
their chiefs and medicine-men. Hundreds of miles 
from any except such small and distant towns as Cal- 
gary and Medicine Hat, and kept on the reserve as 
much as possible, there has come to them less damage 
by whiskey and white men's vices than perhaps most 
other tribes have suffered. Therefore it was still 
possible for me to see in some tents the squaws at 
work painting the clan signs on stretched skins, and 
making bead-work for moccasins, pouches, " chaps," 
and the rest. And in one tepee I found a young 
and rather pretty girl wearing a suit of buckskin, 



CHARTERING A NATION 



37 



such as Cooper and all the past historians of the Ind- 
ian knew as the conventional every-day attire of the 
red-skin. I say I saw the girl in a tent, but, as a mat- 
ter of fact, she passed me out-of-doors, and with true 
feminine art managed to allow her blanket to fall 
open for just the instant it took to disclose the pre- 
cious dress beneath it. I asked to be taken into the 
tent to which she went, and there, at the interpreter's 
request, she threw off her blanket, and stood, with a 
little display of honest coyness, dressed like the tra- 
ditional and the theatrical belle of the wilderness. 
The soft yellowish leather, the heavy fringe upon 
the arms, seams, and edges of the garment, her beau- 
tiful beaded leggings and moccasins, formed so many 
parts of a very charming picture. For herself, her 
face was comely, but her figure was — an Indian's. 
The figure of the typical Indian woman shows few 
graceful curves. 

The reader will inquire whether there was any 
real beauty, as we judge it, among these Indians. 
Yes, there was ; at least there were good looks if 
there was not beauty. I saw perhaps a dozen fine- 
looking men, half a dozen attractive girls, and some- 
thing like a hundred children of varying degrees of 
comeliness — pleasing, pretty, or beautiful. I had 
some jolly romps with the children, and so came to 
know that their faces and arms met my touch with 
the smoothness and softness of the flesh of our own 
little ones at home. I was surprised at this ; indeed, 
the skin of the boys was of the texture of velvet. 
The madcap urchins, what riotous fun they were 
having ! They flung arrows and darts, ran races and 



38 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

wrestled, and in some of their play they fairly swarmed 
all over one another, until at times one lad would be 
buried in the thick of a writhinor mass of le^s and 
arms several feet in depth. Some of the boys wore 
only " G-strings " (as, for some reason, the breech- 
clout is commonly called on the prairie), but others 
were wrapped in old blankets, and the larger ones 
were already wearing the Blackfoot plume-lock, or 
tuft of hair tied and trained to stand erect above the 
forehead. The babies within the tepees were clad 
only in their complexions. 

The result of an hour of waiting on our part and 
of yelling on the part of the herald resulted in a war- 
dance, not very different in itself from the dances we 
have most of us seen at Wild West shows. An im- 
mense tomtom as big as the largest-sized bass-drum 
was set up between four poles, around which colored 
cloths were wrapped, and from the tops of which 
the same gay stuff floated on the wind in bunches 
of party-colored ribbons. Around this squatted 
four young braves, who pounded the drum-head 
and chanted a tune, which rose and fell between 
the shrillest and the deepest notes, but which con- 
sisted of simple monosyllabic sounds repeated thou- 
sands of times. The interpreter said that originally 
the Indians had words to their songs, but these were 
forgotten no man knows when, and only the so-called 
tunes (and the tradition that there once were words 
for them) are perpetuated. At all events, the four 
braves beat the drum and chanted, until presently a 
young warrior, hideous with war-paint, and carrying a 
shield and a tomahawk, came out of a tepee and be- 




'"/{^i'tiJC /^v//yc;o//' 



OPENING OF THE SOLDIER CLAN UAN'CE 



CHARTERING A NATION 



41 



gan the dancing. It was the stiff -legged hopping, first 
on one foot and then on the other, which all savao-es 
appeal* to deem the highest form the terpsichorean 
art can take. In the course of a few circles around 
the tomtom he began shouting of valorous deeds he 
never had performed, for he was too young to have 
ridden after buffalo or into battle. Presently he pre- 
tended to see upon the ground something at once 
fascinating and awesome. It was the trail of the 
enemy. Then he danced furiously and more lim- 
berly, tossing his head back, shaking his hatchet and 
many-tailed shield high aloft, and yelling that he was 
following the foe, and would not rest while a skull 
and a scalp-lock remained in conjunction among 
them. He was joined by three others, and all danced 
and yelled like madmen. At the last the leader came 
to a sort of standard made of a stick and some cloth, 
tore it out from where it had been thrust in the 
ground, and holding it far above his head, pranced 
once around the circle, and thus ended the dance. 

The novelty and interest in the celebration rested 
in the surroundings — the great circle of tepees; the 
braves in their blankets stalking hither and thither ; 
the dogs, the horses, the intrepid riders, dashing 
across the view. More strange still was the solemn 
line of the medicine-men, who, for some reason not 
explained to me, sat in a row with their backs to the 
dancers a city block away, and crooned a low gut- 
tural accompaniment to the tomtom. But still mor-e 
interesting were the boys, of all grades of childhood, 
who looked on, while not a woman remained in sight. 
The larger boys stood about in groups, w^atching the 



42 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

spectacle with eyes afire with admiration, but the 
little fellows had flung themselves on their stomachs 
in a row, and were supporting their chubby faces 
upon their little brown hands, while their elbows 
rested on the grass, forming a sort of orchestra row 
of Lilliputian spectators. 

We arranged for a great spectacle to be gotten up 
on the next afternoon, and were promised that it 
should be as notable for the numbers participating 
in it and for the trappings to be displayed as any the 
Blackfeet had ever given upon their reserve. The 
Indians spent the entire night in carousing over the 
gift of tea, and we knew that if they were true to 
most precedents they would brew and drink every 
drop of it. Possibly some took it with an admixture 
of tobacco and wild currant to make them drunk, or, 
in reality, very sick — which is much the same thing 
to a reservation Indian. The compounds which the 
average Indian will swallow in the hope of imitating 
the effects of whiskey are such as to tax the credulity 
of those who hear of them. A certain patent "pain- 
killer" ranks almost as high as whiskey in their esti- 
mation; but Worcestershire sauce and gunpowder, 
or tea, tobacco, and wild currant, are not at all to be 
despised when alcohol, or the money to get it with, 
is wanting. I heard a characteristic story about these 
red men while I was visiting them. All who are 
familiar with them know that if medicine is given 
them to take in small portions at certain intervals 
they are morally sure to swallow it all at once, and 
that the sicker it makes them, the more they will 
value it. On the Blackfoot Reserve, only a short time 




SKETCII IN THE SOLDIER CLAN DANCE 



ago, our gentle and insinuating Sedlitz-powders were 
classed as children's stuff, but now they have leaped 
to the front rank as powerful medicines. This is be- 
cause some white man showed the Indian how to 
take the soda and magnesia first, and then swallow 
the tartaric acid. They do this, and when the ex- 
plosion follows, and the gases burst from their mouths 
and noses, they pull themselves together and remark, 
" Ugh ! him heap good." 

On the morning of the day of the great spectacle I 
rode with Mr. Begg over to the ration-house to see the 
meat distributed. The dust rose in clouds above all 
the trails as the cavalcade of men, women, children, 
travoises and dogs, approached the station. Men 
were few in the disjointed lines; most of them sent 



44 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

their women or children. All rode astraddle, some 
on saddles and some bareback. As all urged their 
horses in the Indian fashion, which is to whip them 
unceasingly, and prod them constantly with spurless 
heels, the bobbing movement of the riders' heads and 
the gymnastics of their legs produced a queer scene. 
Here and there a travels was trailed along by a horse 
or a dog, but the majority of the pensioners were 
content to carry their meat in bags or otherwise upon 
their horses. While the slaus^hterinsf went on, and 
after that, when the beef was being chopped up into 
junks, I sat in the meat-contractor's office, and saw 
the bucks, squaws, and children come, one after 
another, to beg. I could not help noticing that all 
were treated with marked and uniform kindness, and 
I learned that no one ever struck one of the Indians, 
or suffered himself to lose his temper with them. A 
few of the men asked for blankets, but the squaws 
and the children wanted soap. It was said that when 
they first made their acquaintance with this symbol 
of civilization they mistook it for an article of diet, 
but that now they use it properly and prize it. When 
it was announced that the meat was ready, the butch- 
ers threw open an aperture in the wall of the ration- 
house, and the Indians huddled before it as if they 
had flung themselves against the house in a mass. 
I have seen boys do the same thing at the opening 
of a ticket window for the sale of gallery seats in a 
theatre. There was no fighting or quarrelling, but 
every Indian pushed steadily and silently with all his 
or her might. When one got his share he tore him- 
self away from the crowd as briers are pulled out of 



CHARTERING A NATION 45 

hairy cloth. They are a hungry and an economical 
people. They bring pails for the beef blood, and 
they carry home the hoofs for jelly. After a steer 
has been butchered and distributed, 'only his horns 
and his paunch remain. 

The sun blazed down on the great camp that af- 
ternoon and glorified the place so that it looked like 
a miniature Switzerland of snowy peaks. But it was 
hot, and blankets were stretched from the tent tops, 
and the women sat under them to catch the air and 
escape the heat. The salaried native policeman of 
the reserve, wearing a white stove-pipe hat with 
feathers, and a ridiculous blue coat, and Heaven 
alone knows what other absurdities, rode around, 
boasting of deeds he never performed, while a white 
cur made him all the more ridiculous by chasing him 
and yelping at his horse's tail. 

And then came the grand spectacle. The vast 
plain was forgotten, and the great campus within the 
circle of tents was transformed into a theatre. The 
scene was a setting of white and red tents that threw 
their clear-cut outlines against a matchless blue sky. 
The audience was composed of four white men and 
the Indian boys, who were flung about by the startled 
horses they were holding for us. The players were 
the gorgeous cavalrymen of nature, circling before 
their women and old men and children, themselves 
plumed like unheard-of tropical birds, the others 
displaying the minor splendor of the kaleidoscope. 
The play was " The Pony War -dance, or the De- 
parture for Battle." The acting was fierce; not like 
the conduct of a mimic battle on our stage, but per- 



46 ON Canada's frontier 

formed with the desperate zest of men who hope for 
distinction in war, and may not trifle about it It 
had the earnestness of a challenged man who tries 
the foils with a tutor. It was impressive, inspiring, 
at times wildly exciting. 

There were threescore young men in the brilliant 
cavalcade. They rode horses that were as wild as 
themselves. Their evolutions were rude, but mag- 
nificent. Now they dashed past us in single file, and 
next they came helter-skelter, like cattle stampeding. 
For a while they rode around and around, as on a 
race-course, but at times they deserted the enclosure, 
parted into small bands, and were hidden behind the 
curtains of their own dust, presently to reappear with 
a mad rush, yelling like maniacs, firing their pieces, 
and brandishing their arms and their finery wildly on 
high. The orchestra was composed of seven tom- 
toms that had been dried taut before a camp fire. 
The old men and the chiefs sat in a semicircle be- 
hind the drummers on the ground. 

All the tribal heirlooms were in the display, the 
cherished gewgaws, trinkets, arms, apparel, and finery 
they had saved from the fate of which they will not 
admit they are themselves the victims. I never saw 
an old-time picture of a type of savage red man or of 
an extravaQ:ance of their costumins: that was not re- 
vived in this spectacle. It was as if the plates in my 
old school-books and novels and tales of adventure 
were all animated and passing before me. The tra- 
ditional Indian with the eagle plumes from crown to 
heels was there; so was he with the buffalo horns 
growing out of his skull ; so were the idyllic braves 




. ^i.;. ,^\\a,». ' \ .Sj\s v\vv>\*M4l,v.\v»r.UIIH 



CHARTERING A NATION 



49 



in yellow buckskin fringed at every point. The shin- 
ing bodies of men, bare naked, and frescoed like a 
Bowery bar-room, were not lacking; neither were 
those who wore masses of splendid embroidery with 
colored beads. But there were as many peculiar 
costumes which I never had seen pictured. And 
not any two men or any two horses were alike. As 
barber poles are covered with paint, so were many of 
these choice steeds of the nation. Some were spotted 
all over with daubs of white, and some with every 
color obtainable. Some were branded fifty times 
with the white hand, the symbol of peace, but others 
bore the red hand and the white hand in alternate 
prints. There w^ere horses painted with the figures 
of horses and of serpents and of foxes. To some 
saddles were affixed colored blankets or cloths that 
fell upon the ground or lashed the air, according as 
the horse cantered or raced. One horse was hung 
all round with great soft woolly tails of some white 
material. Sleigh-bells were upon several. 

Only half a dozen men wore hats — mainly cowboy 
hats decked with feathers. Many carried rifles, which 
they used with one hand. Others brought out bows 
and arrows, lances decked with feathers or ribbons, 
poles hung with colored cloths, great shields brill- 
iantly painted and fringed. Every visible inch of 
each warrior was painted, the naked ones being 
ringed, streaked, and striped from head to foot. I 
would have to catalogue the possessions of tfie whole 
nation to tell all that they wore between the brass 
rings in their hair and the cartridge-belts at their 
waists, and thus down to their beautiful moccasins. 

4 



50 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

Two strange features further distinguished their 
pageant. One was the appearance of two negro 
minstrels upon one horse. Both had blackened their 
faces and hands ; both wore old stove-pipe hats and 
queer long- tailed white men's coats. One wore a 
huge false white mustache, and the other carried a 
coal-scuttle. The women and children roared with 
laughter at the si2:ht. The two comedians s^ot down 
from their horse, and began to make grimaces, and 
to pose this way and that, very comically. Such a 
performance had never been seen on the reserve be- 
fore. No one there could explain where the men had 
seen negro minstrels. The other unexpected feature 
required time for development. At first we noticed 
that two little Indian boys kept getting in the way of 
the riders. As we were not able to find any fixed 
place of safety from the excited horsemen, we mar- 
velled that these children were permitted to risk their 
necks. 

Suddenly a hideously -painted naked man on 
horseback chased the little boys, leaving the caval- 
cade, and circling around the children. He rode 
back into the ranks, and still they loitered in the 
way. Then around swept the horsemen once more, 
and this time the naked rider flung himself from his 
horse, and seizing one boy and then the other, bore 
each to the ground, and made as if he would brain 
them with his hatchet and lift their scalps with his 
knife. The sight was one to paralyze an on-looker. 
But it was only a theatrical performance arranged for 
the occasion. The man was acting over again the 
proudest of his achievements. The boys played the 




•s:N,'tf 






THROWIiN'G THE SNOW SNAKE 



parts of two white men whose scalps now grace his 
tepee and gladden his memory. 

For ninety minutes we watched the glorious rid- 
ing, the splendid horses, the brilliant trappings, 
and the paroxysmal fervor of the excited Indians. 
The earth trembled beneath the dashing of the 
riders; the air palpitated with the noise of their 
war-cries and bells. We could have stood the day 
out, but we knew the players were tired, and yet 



52 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

would not cease till we withdrew. Therefore we 
came away. 

We had enjoyed a never-to-be-forgotten privilege. 
It was as if we had seen the ghosts of a dead people 
ride back to parody scenes in an era that had van- 
ished. It was like the rising of the curtain, in re- 
sponse to an " encore," upon a drama that has been 
played. It was as if the sudden up- flashing of a 
smouldering fire lighted, once again and for an in- 
stant, the scene it had ceased to illumine. 



Ill 

A FAMOUS MISSIONARY 

THE former chief of the Blackfeet — Crowfoot — 
and Father Lacombe, the Roman Cathohc 
missionary to the tribe, were the most interesting 
and among the most influential public characters in 
the newer part of Canada. They had much to do 
with controlling the peace of a territory the size of a 
great empire. 

The chief was more than eighty years old ; the 
priest is a dozen years younger ; and yet they repre- 
sented in their experiences the two great epochs of 
life on this continent — the barbaric and the progress- 
ive. In the chief's boyhood the red man held undis- 
puted sway from the Lakes to the Rockies. In the 
priest's youth he led, like a scout, beyond the advanc- 
ing hosts from Europe. But Father Lacombe came 
bearing the olive branch of religion, and he and the 
barbarian became fast friends, intimates in a compan- 
ionship as picturesque and out of the common as any 
the world could produce. 

There is something very strange about the rela- 
tions of the French and the French half-breeds with 
the wild men of the plains. It is not altogether nec- 
essary that the Frenchman should be a priest, for I 
have heard of French half-breeds in our Territories 
who showed again and again that they could make 



54 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

their way through bands of hostiles in perfect safety, 
though knowing nothing of the language of the tribes 
there in war-paint. It is most Hkely that their swarthy 
skins and black hair, and their knowledge of savage 
ways aided them. But when not even a French half- 
breed has dared to risk his life among angry Indians, 
the French missionaries went about their duty fear- 
lessly and unscathed. There was one, just after the 
dreadful massacre of the Little Big Horn, who built 
a cross of rough wood, painted it white, fastened it to 
his buck-board, and drove through a country in which 
a white man with a pale face and blond hair would 
not have lived two hours. 

It must be remembered that in a vast region of 
country the French priest and voyageur and co7trair 
des bois were the first white men the Indians saw, and 
while the explorers and traders seldom quarrelled 
with the red men or offered violence to them, the 
priests never did. They went about like women or 
children, or, rather, like nothing else than priests. 
They quickly learned the tongues of the savages, 
treated them fairly, showed the sublimest courage, 
and acted as counsellors, physicians, and friends. 
There is at least one brave Indian fighter in our 
army who will state it as his belief that if all the 
white men had done thus we would have had but lit- 
tle trouble with our Indians. 

Father Lacombe was one of the priests who thread- 
ed the trails of the North-western timber land and the 
Far Western prairie when white men were very few 
indeed in that country, and the only settlements were 
those that had grown around the frontier forts and 



A FAMOUS MISSIONARY 55 

the still earlier mission chapels. For instance, in 
1849, at twenty-two years of age, he slept a night or 
two where St. Paul now weights the earth. It was 
then a village of twenty-five log-huts, and where the 
great building of the St. Paul Pioneer Press now 
stands, then stood the village chapel. For two years 
he worked at his calling on either side of the Ameri- 
can frontier, and then was sent to what is now Ed- 
monton, in that magical region of long summers and 
great agricultural capacity known as the Peace River 
District, hundreds of miles north of Dakota and 
Idaho. There the Rockies are broken and lowered, 
and the warm Pacific winds have rendered the reQ:ion 
warmer than the land far to the south of it. But 
Father Lacombe went farther — 400 miles north to 
Lake Labiche. There he found what he calls a fine 
colony of half-breeds. These were dependants of the 
Hudson Bay Company — white men from England, 
France, and the Orkney Islands, and Indians and 
half-breeds and their children. The visits of priests 
were so infrequent that in the intervals between them 
the white men and Indian women married one an- 
other, not without formality and the sanction of the 
colony, but without waiting for the ceremony of the 
Church. Father Lacombe was called upon to bless 
and solemnize many such matches, to baptize many 
children, and to teach and preach what scores knew 
but vaguely or not at all. 

In time he was sent to Calgary, in the province of 
Alberta. It is one of the most bustling towns in the 
Dominion, and the biggest place west of Winnipeg. 
Alberta is north of our Montana, and is all prairie- 



56 ON Canada's frontier 

land; but from Father Lacombe's parsonage one sees 
the snow-capped Rockies, sixty miles away, lying 
above the horizon like a line of clouds tinged with 
the delicate hues of mother-of-pearl in the sunshine. 
Calgary was a mere post in the wilderness for years 
after the priest went there. The buffaloes roamed 
the prairie in fabulous numbers, the Indians used the 
bow and arrow in the chase, and the maps we studied 
at the time showed the whole region enclosed in a 
loop, and marked " Blackfoot Indians." But the other 
Indians were loath to accept this disposition of the 
territory as final, and the country thereabouts was an 
almost constant battle-ground .between the Blackfoot 
nation of allied tribes and the Sioux, Crows, Flat- 
heads, Crees, and others. 

The good priest — for if ever there was a good man 
Father Lacombe is one — saw fighting enough, as he 
roamed with one tribe and the other, or journeyed 
from tribe to tribe. His mission led him to ignore 
tribal differences, and to preach to all the Indians of 
the plains. He knew the chiefs and headmen among 
them all, and so justly did he deal with them that he 
was not only able to minister to all without attract- 
ing the enmity of any, but he came to wield, as he 
does to-day, a formidable power over all of them. 

He knew old Crowfoot in his prime, and as I saw 
them together they were like bosom friends. To- 
gether they had shared dreadful privation and sur- 
vived frightful winters and storms. They had gone 
side by side through savage battles, and each respect- 
ed and loved the other. I think I make no mistake 
in saying that all through his reign Crowfoot was the 



A FAMOUS MISSIONARY 



57 



greatest Indian monarch in Canada ; possibly no 
tribe in this country was stronger in numbers during 
the last decade or two. I have never seen a nobler- 
looking Indian or a more king-like man. He was tall 
and straight, as slim as a girl, and he had the face of 
an eagle or of an ancient Roman. He never troubled 
himself to learn the English language ; he had little 
use for his own. His grunt or his "No "ran all 
through his tribe. He never shared his honors with 
a squaw. He died an old bachelor, saying, wittily, 
that no woman would take him. 

It must be remembered that the deoradation of 
the Canadian Indian began a dozen or fifteen years 
later than that of our own red men. In both coun- 
tries the railroads were indirectly the destructive 
agents, and Canada's great transcontinental line is a 
new institution. Until it belted the prairie the other 
day the Blackfoot Indians led very much the life of 
their fathers, hunting and trading for the whites, to 
be sure, but living like Indians, fighting like Indians, 
and dying like them. Now they don't fight, and they 
live and die like dogs. Amid the old conditions 
lived Crowfoot — ^a haughty, picturesque, grand old 
savage. He never rode or walked without his head- 
men in his retinue, and when he wished to exert his 
authority, his apparel was royal indeed. His coat 
of gaudy bead -work was a splendid garment, and 
weighed a dozen pounds. His leg-gear was just as 
fine; his m.occasins would fetch fifty dollars in any 
city to-day. Doubtless he thought his hat was quite 
as impressive and king-like, but to a mere scion of 
effeminate civilization it looked remarkably like an 



58 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

extra tall plug hat, with no crown in the top and a 
lot of crows' plumes in the band. You may be sure 
his successor wears that same hat to-day, for the Ind- 
ians revere the " state hat " of a brave chief, and look 
at it through superstitious eyes, so that those queer 
hats (older tiles than ever see the light of St. Patrick's 
Day) descend from chief to chief, and are hallowed. 

But Crowfoot died none too soon. The history of 
the conquest of the wilderness contains no more pa- 
thetic story than that of how the kind old priest. 
Father Lacombe, warned the chief and his lieuten- 
ants against the coming of the pale-faces. He went 
to the reservation and assembled the leaders before 
him in council. He told them that the white men 
were building a great railroad, and in a month their 
workmen would be in that virgin country. He told 
the wondering red men that among these laborers 
would be found many bad men seeking to sell whis- 
key, offering money for the ruin of the squaws. 
Reaching the greatest eloquence possible for him, 
because he loved the Indians and doubted their 
strength, he assured them that contact with these 
white men would result in death, in the destruction 
of the Indians, and by the most horrible processes of 
disease and misery. He thundered and he pleaded. 
The Indians smoked and reflected. Then they 
spoke through old Crowfoot : 

" We have listened. We will keep upon our res- 
ervation. We will not go to see the railroad." 

But Father Lacombe doubted still, and yet more 
profoundly was he convinced of the ruin of the tribe 
should the " children," as he sagely calls all Indians, 



A FAMOUS MISSIONARY 59 

disobey him. So once again he went to the reserve, 
and gathered the chief and the headmen, and warned 
them of the soulless, diabolical, selfish instincts of 
the white men. Again the grave warriors promised 
to obey him. 

The railroad laborers came with camps and money 
and liquors and numbers, and the prairie thundered 
the echoes of their sledge-hammer strokes. And one 
morning the old priest looked out of the window of 
his bare bedroom and saw curling wisps of gray 
smoke ascending from a score of tepees on the hill 
beside Calgary.* Angry, amazed, he went to his 
doorway and opened it, and there upon the ground 
sat some of the headmen and the old men, with bow- 
ed heads, ashamed. Fancy the priest's wrath and his 
questions ! Note how wisely he chose the name of 
children for them, when I tell you that their spokes- 
man at last answered with the excuse that the buffa- 
loes were gone, and food was hard to get, and the 
white men brought money which the squaws could 
get. And what is the end ? There are always te- 
pees on the hills now beside every settlement near 
the Blackfoot reservation. And one old missionary 
lifted his trembling forefinger towards the sk3% when 
I was there, and said : " Mark me. In fifteen years 
there will not be a full-blooded Indian alive on the 
Canadian prairie — not one." 

Through all that revolutionary railroad building 
and the rush of new settlers, Father Lacombe and 

* Since this was written Feather Lacombe's work has been con- 
tinued at Fort McLcod in the same province as Calgary. In this 
smaller place he finds more time for his literary pursuits. 



6o ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

Crowfoot kept the Indians from war, and even from 
depredations and from murder. Wlien the half- 
breeds arose under Riel, and every Indian looked to 
his rifle and his knife, and when the mutterings that 
preface the war-cry sounded in every lodge, Father 
Lacombe made Crowfoot pledge his word that the 
Indians should not rise. The priest represented the 
Government on these occasions. The Canadian 
statesmen recognize the value of his services. He 
is the great authority on Indian matters beyond our 
border; the ambassador to and spokesman for the 
Indians. 

But Father Lacombe is more than that. He is 
the deepest student of the Indian languages that 
Canada possesses. The revised edition of Bishop 
Barager's Grammar of the Ochipzve Language bears 
these words upon its title-page: " Revised by the Rev. 
Father Lacombe, Oblate Mary Immaculate, 1878." 
He is the author of the authoritative Dictionnaire et 
Grammaire de la Langiie Crise, the dictionary of the 
Cree dialect published in 1874. He has compiled 
just such another monument to the Blackfoot lan- 
guage, and will soon publish it, if he has not done so 
already. He is in constant correspondence with our 
Smithsonian Institution ; he is famous to all who 
study the Indian ; he is beloved or admired through- 
out Canada. 

His work in these lines is labor of love. He is a 
student by nature. He began the study of the Algon- 
quin language as a youth in older Canada, and the 
tongues of many of these tribes from Labrador to 
Athabasca are but dialects of the language of the 



A FAMOUS MISSIONARY 63 

great Algonquin nation — the Algic family. He told 
me that the white man's handling of Indian words in 
the nomenclature of our cities, provinces, and States 
is as brutal as anything charged against the savages. 
Saskatchewan, for instance, means nothing. " Kis- 
Siskatchewan " is the word that was intended. It 
means " rapid current." Manitoba is senseless, but 
"Manitowapa" (the mysterious strait) would have 
been full of local import. However, there is no need 
to sadden ourselves with this expert knowledge. 
Rather let us be grateful for every Indian name with 
which we have stamped individuality upon the map 
of the world, be it rightly or wrongly set forth. 

It is strange to think of a scholar and a priest 
amid the scenes that Father Lacombe has witnessed. 
It was one of the most fortunate happenings of my 
hfe that I chanced to be in Calgary and in the little 
mission beside the chapel when Chief Crowfoot came 
to pay his respects to his old black-habited friend. 
Anxious to pay the chief such a compliment as should 
present the old warrior to me in the light in which he 
would be most proud to be viewed. Father Lacombe 
remarked that he had known Crowfoot when he was 
a young man and a mighty warrior. The old cop- 
per-plated Roman smiled and swelled his chest when 
this was translated. He was so pleased that the 
priest was led to ask him if he remembered one night 
when a certain trouble about some horses, or a chance 
duel between the Blackfoot tribe and a band of its 
enemies, led to a midnight attack. If my memory 
serves me, it was the Bloods (an allied part of the 
Blackfoot nation) who picked this quarrel. The chief 



64 ON Canada's frontier 

grinned and grunted wonderfully as the priest spoke. 
The priest asked if he remembered how the Bloods 
were routed. The chief grunted even more emphat- 
ically. Then the priest asked if the chief recalled 
what a pickle he, the priest, was in when he found 
himself in the thick of the fight. At that* old Crow- 
foot actually laughed. 

After that Father Lacombe, in a few bold sen- 
tences, drew a picture of the quiet, sleep- enfolded 
camp of the Blackfoot band, of the silence and the 
darkness. Then he told of a sudden musket-shot; 
then, of the screaming of the squaws, and the bark- 
ing of the dogs, and the yelling of the children, of 
the general hubbub and confusion of the startled 
camp. The cry was everywhere " The Bloods ! the 
Bloods !" The enemy shot a fusillade at close quar- 
ters into the Blackfoot camp, and the priest ran out 
towards the blazing muskets, crying that they must 
stop, for he, their priest, was in the camp. He shout- 
ed his own name, for he stood towards the Bloods 
precisely as he did towards the Blackfoot nation. 
But whether the Bloods heard him or not, they did 
not heed him. The blaze of their guns grew strong- 
er and crept nearer. The bullets whistled by. It 
grew exceedingly unpleasant to be there. It was 
dansrerous as well. Father Lacombe said that he did 
all he could to stop the fight, but when it was evi- 
dent that his behavior would simply result in the mas- 
sacre of his hosts and of himself in the bargain, he 
altered his cries into military commands. " Give it 
to 'em !" he screamed. He urged Crowfoot's braves 
to return two shots for every one from the enemy. 



A FAMOUS MISSIONARY 65 

He took command, and inspired the bucks with 
double valor. They drove the Bloods out of reach 
and hearino-. 

All this was translated to Crowfoot — or Saponaxi- 
taw, for that was his Indian name — and he chuckled 
and grinned, and poked the priest in the side with 
his knuckles. And good Father Lacombe felt the 
magnetism of his own words and memory, and clapped 
the chief on the shoulder, while both laughed heartily 
at the climax, with the accompanying mental picture 
of the discomfited Bloods running away, and the cler- 
gyman ordering their instant destruction. 

There may not be such another meeting and re- 
hearsal on this continent again. Those two men 
represented the passing and the dominant races of 
America ; and yet, in my view, the learned and brave 
and kindly missionary is as much a part of the dead 
past as is the royalty that Crowfoot was the last to 
represent. 



IV 



ANTOINE S MOOSE-YARD 




I 



T was the night of a great din- 
ner at the ckib. Whenever 
the door of the banqueting hall 
was opened, a burst of laughter or 
of applause disturbed the quiet talk 
of a few men who had gathered in 
the readinor-room — men of the sort 
that extract the best enjoyment 
from a club by escaping its func- 
tions, or attending them only to draw to one side 
its choicest spirits for never-to-be-forgotten talks be- 
fore an open fire, and over wine and cigars used 
sparingly. 

"I'm tired," an artist was saying — "so tired that I 
have a horror of my studio. My wife understands 
my condition, and bids me go away and rest." 

" That is astonishing," said I ; " for, as a rule, 
neither women nor men can comprehend the fatigue 
that seizes an artist or writer. At most of our 
homes there comes to be a reluctant recognition of 
the fact that we say we are tired, and that we persist 
in the assumption by knocking off work. But hu- 
man fatiorue is measured bv the mile of walkino^, 
or the cords of firewood that have been cut, and 
the world will always hold that if we have not hewn 



ANTOINE S MOOSE-YARD 67 

wood or tramped all day, it is absurd for us to talk 
of feeling tired. We cannot alter this ; we are too 
few." 

" Yes," said another of the little party. " The 
world shares the feeling of the Irishman who saw a 
very large, stout man at work at reporting in a court- 
room. 'Faith!' said he, 'will ye look at the size of 
that man — to be aiming his living wid a little pincil?' 
The world would acknowledge our right to feel tired 
if we used crow-bars to write or draw with ; but pen- 
cils ! pshaw! a hundred weigh less than a pound." 

" Well," said I, " all the same, I am so tired that my 
head feels like cork ; so tired that for two days I 
have not been able to summon an idea or turn a sen- 
tence neatly. I have been sitting at my desk writ- 
ing wretched stuff and tearing it up, or staring 
blankly out of the window." 

" Glorious !" said the artist, startling us all with 
his vehemence and inapt exclamation. " Why, it is 
providential that I came here to-night. If that's the 
way you feel, we are a pair, and you will go with me 
and rest. Do you hunt.'^ Are you fond of it.^" 

" I know all about it," said I, "but I have not defi- 
nitely determined whether I am fond of it or not. 
I have been hunting only once. It was years ago, 
when I was a mere boy. I went after deer with a 
poet, an editor, and a railroad conductor. We jour- 
neyed to a lovely valley in Mififlin County, Pennsyl- 
vania, and put ourselves in the hands of a man seven 
feet high, who had a flintlock musket a foot taller 
than himself, and a wife who gave us saleratus bread 
and a bowl of pork fat for supper and breakfast. We 



68 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

were not there at dinner. The man stationed us a 
mile apart on what he said were the paths, or " run- 
ways," the deer would take. Then he went to stir 
the game up with his dogs. There he left us from 
sunrise till supper, or would have left us had we not 
with great difficulty found one' another, and enjoyed 
the exquisite woodland quiet and light and shade 
together, mainly flat on our backs, with the white 
sails of the sky floating in an azure sea above the 
reaching fingers of the tree-tops. The editor marred 
the occasion with an unworthy suspicion that our 
hunter was at the village tavern picturing to his 
cronies what simple donkeys we were, standing a 
mile apart in the forsaken woods. But the poet said 
something so pregnant with philosophy that it always 
comes back to me with the mention of hunting. 
' Where is your gun ?' he was asked, when we came 
upon him, pacing the forest path, hands in pockets, 
and no weapon in sight. ' Oh, my gun ?' he repeated. 
' I don't know. Somewhere in among those trees. 
I covered it with leaves so as not to see it. After 
this, if I go hunting again, I shall not take a gun. 
It is very cold and heavy, and more or less danger- 
ous in the bargain. You never use it, you know. 
I go hunting every few years, but I never yet have 
had to fire my gun, and I begin to see that it is only 
brought along in deference to a tradition descending 
from an era when men got something more than 
fresh air and scenery on a hunting trip.' " 

The others laughed at my story, but the artist 
regarded me with an expression of pity. He is a 
famous hunter — a genuine, devoted hunter — and one 




THE HOTEL — LAST SIGN OF CIVILIZATION 

might almost as safely speak a light word of his rela- 
tions as of his favorite mode of recreation. 

" Fresh air!" said he ; "scenery! Humph! Your 
poet would not know which end of a gun to aim 
with. I see that you know nothing at all about 
hunting, but I will pay you the high compliment of 
saying that I can make a hunter of you. I have 
always insisted heretofore that a hunter must begin 
in boyhood ; but never mind, I'll make a hunter of 
you at thirty-six. We will start to-morrow morning 
for Montreal, and in twenty-four hours you shall be 
in the greatest sporting region in America, incom- 
parably the greatest hunting district. It is great 
because Americans do not know of it, and because 
it has all of British America to keep it supplied with 
game. Think of it! In twenty-four hours we shall 
be tracking moose near Hudson Bay, for Hudson 
Bay is not much farther from New York than Chi- 
cago — another fact that few persons are aware of." 

Environment is a positive force. \Vc could feel 



70 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

that we were disturbing what the artist would call 
" the local tone," by rushing through the city's streets 
next morning with our guns slung upon our backs. 
It was just at the hour when the factory hands and 
the shop-girls were out in force, and the juxtaposi- 
tion of those elements of society with two portly 
men bearing guns created a positive sensation. In 
the cars the artist held forth upon the terrors of the 
life upon which I was about to venture. He left 
upon my mind a blurred impression of sleeping out- 
of-doors, like human cocoons, done up in blankets, 
while the savage mercury lurked in unknown depths 
below the zero mark. He said the camp-fire would 
have to be fed every two hours of each night, and he 
added, without contradiction from me, that he sup- 
posed he would have to perform this duty, as he was 
accustomed to it. Lest his forecast should raise my 
anticipation of pleasure extravagantly, he added ^hat 
those hunters were fortunate who had fires to feed ; 
for his part he had once walked around a tree stump 
a whole night to keep from freezing. He supposed 
that we would perform our main journeying on snow- 
shoes, but how we should enjoy that he could not 
say, as his knowledge of snow-shoeing was limited. 

At this point the inevitable offspring of fate, who 
is always at a travellers elbow with a fund of alarm- 
ing information, cleared his throat as he sat opposite 
us, and inquired whether he had overheard that we 
did not know much about snow-shoes. An interest- 
ing fact concerning them, he said, was that they 
seemed easy to walk with at first, but if the learner 
fell down with them on it usually needed a consider- 



ANTOINES MOOSE-YARD 71 

able portion of a tribe of Indians to put him back on 
his feet. Beginners only fell down, however, in at- 
tempting to cross a log or stump, but the forest 
where we were going was literally floored with such 
obstructions. The first day's effort to navigate with 
snow-shoes, he remarked, is usually accompanied by 
a terrible malady called mal de raquettc, in which the 
cords of one's legs become knotted in great and ex- 
cruciatingly painful bunches. The cure for this is to 
" walk it off the next day, when the agony is yet 
more intense than at first." As the stranger had 
reached his destination, he had little more than time 
to remark that the moose is an exceedingly vicious 
animal, invariably attacking all hunters who fail to 
kill him with the first shot. As the stranger stepped 
upon the car platform he let fall a simple but touch- 
ing eulogy upon a dear friend who had recently lost 
his life by being literally cut in two, lengthwise, by a 
moose that struck him on the chest with its rigidly 
stiffened fore -legs. The artist protested that the 
stranger was a sensationalist, unsupported by either 
the camp-fire gossip or the literature of hunters. 
Yet one man that night found his slumber tangled 
with what the garrulous alarmist had been saying. 

In Montreal one may buy clothing not to be had 
in the United States : woollens thick as boards, ho- 
siery that wards off the cold as armor resists missiles, 
gloves as heavy as shoes, yet soft as kid, fur caps and 
coats at prices and in a variety that interest poor and 
rich alike, blanket suits that are more picturesque 
than any other masculine garment worn north of the 
city of Mexico, tuques, and moccasins, and, indeed, so 



72 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

many sorts of clothing we Yankees know very little 
of (though many of us need them) that at a glance 
we say the Montrealers are foreigners. Montreal is 
the gayest city on this continent, and I have often 
thought that the clothing there is largely responsible 
for that condition. 

A New Yorker disembarking in Montreal in mid- 
winter finds the place inhospitably cold, and wonders 
how, as well as why, any one lives there. I well re- 
member standing years ago beside a toboggan-slide, 
with my teeth chattering and my very marrow slowly 
congealing, when my attention was called to the fact 
that a dozen ruddy-cheeked, bright- eyed, laughing 
girls were grouped in snow that reached their knees. 
I asked a Canadian lady how that could be possible, 
and she answered with a list of the principal gar- 
ments those girls were wearing. They had two pairs 
of stockings under their shoes, and a pair of stockings 
over their shoes, with moccasins over them. They 
had so many woollen skirts that an American girl 
would not believe me if I gave the number. They 
wore heavy dresses and buckskin jackets, and blanket 
suits over all this. They had mittens over their 
gloves, and fur caps over their knitted hoods. It no 
longer seemed wonderful that they should not heed 
the cold; indeed, it occurred to me that their bravery 
amid the terrors of tobogganing was no bravery at 
all, since a girl buried deep in the heart of such a 
mass of woollens could scarcely expect damage if she 
fell from a steeple. When next I appeared out-of- 
doors I too was swathed in flannel, like a jewel in a 
box of plush, and from that time out Montreal seemed, 



m\\\\\'\\\\\\\\\\\\\\-^^^^^^^ 




"give me a light" 



ANTOINES MOOSE -YARD 75 



what it really is, the merriest of American capitals. 
And there I had come again, and was filling my trunk 
with this wonderful armor of civilization, while the 
artist sought advice as to which point to enter the 
wilderness in order to secure the biggest game most 
quickly. 

Mr. W. C. Van Home, the President of the Cana- 
dian Pacific Railroad, proved a friend in need. He 
dictated a few telegrams that agitated the people of a 
vast section of country between Ottawa and the Great 
Lakes. And in the afternoon the answers came fly- 
ing back. These were from various points where 
Hudson Bay posts are situated. At one or two the 
Indian trappers and hunters were all away on their 
winter expeditions ; from another a famous white 
hunter had just departed with a party of gentlemen. 
At Mattawa, in Ontario, moose were close at hand 
and plentiful, and two skilled Indian hunters were 
just in from a trapping expedition ; but the post 
factor, Mr. Rankin, was sick in bed, and the Indians 
were on a spree. To Mattawa we decided to go. It 
is a twelve-hour journey from New York to Montreal, 
and an eleven-hour journey from Montreal to the 
heart of this hunters' paradise; so that, had we known 
at just what point to enter the forest, we could have 
taken the trail in twenty-four hours from the metrop- 
olis, as the artist had predicted. 

Our first taste of the frontier, at Peter O'Farrall's 
Ottawa Hotel, in Mattawa, was delicious in the ex- 
treme. O'Farrall used to be game- keeper to the 
Marquis of Waterford, and thus got " a taste of the 
quality" that promj^ted him to assume the position he 



76 ON Canada's frontier 

has chosen as the most lordly hotel-keeper in Canada. 
We do not know what sort of men own our great 
New York and Chicago and San Francisco hotels, 
but certainly they cannot lead more leisurely, com- 
placent lives than Mr. O'Farrall. He has a bar- 
tender to look after the male visitors and the bar, 
and a matronly relative to see to the women and the 
kitchen, so that the landlord arises when he likes to 
enjoy each succeeding day of ease and prosperity. 
He has been known to exert himself, as when he 
chased a man who spoke slightingly of his liquor. 
And he was momentarily ruffled at the trying con- 
duct of the artist on this hunting trip. The artist 
could not find his overcoat, and had the temerity to 
refer the matter to Mr. O'Farrall. 

" Sir," said the artist, " what do you suppose has 
become of my overcoat ? I cannot find it anywhere." 

" I don't know anything about your botheration 
overcoat," said Mr. O'Farrall. " Sure, I've throuble 
enough kaping thrack of me own." 

The reader may be sure that O'Farrall's was rightly 
recommended to us, and that it is a well-managed and 
popular place, with good beds and excellent fare, and 
with no extra charge for the delightful addition of the 
host himself, who is very tall and dignified and hu- 
morous, and who is the oddest and yet most pictu- 
resque-looking public character in the Dominion. 
Such an oddity is certain to attract queer characters 
to his side, and Mr. O'Farrall is no exception to the 
rule. One of the waiter-girls in the dining-room was 
found never by any chance to know anything that she 
was asked about. For instance, she had never heard 



ANTOINES MOOSE-VARD yy 

of Mr. Rankin, the chief man of the place. To every 
question she made answer, "Sure, there does be a 
great dale goin' on here and I know nothin' of it." 
Of her the artist ventured the theory that " she could 
not know everything on a waiter-girl's salary." John, 
the bar-tender, was a delightful study. No matter 
what a visitor laid down in the smoking-room, John 
picked it up and carried it behind the bar. Every 
one was continually losing something and searching 
for it, always to observe that John was able to pro- 
duce it with a smile and the wise remark that he had 
taken the lost article and put it away " for fear some 
one would pick it up." Finally, there was Mr. O'Far- 
rall's dog — a ragged, time-worn, petulant terrier, no 
bigger than a pint-pot. Mr. O'Farrall nevertheless 
called him " Fairy," and said he kept him " to protect 
the village children against wild bears." 

I shall never be able to think of Mattawa as it is — 
a plain little lumbering town on the Ottawa River, 
with the wreck and ruin of once grand scenery hem- 
ming it in on all sides, in the form of ragged mount- 
ains literally ravaged by fire and the axe. Hints of 
it come back to me in dismembered bits that prove 
it to have been interesting: vignettes of little school- 
boys in blanket suits and moccasins, of great-spirited 
horses forever racing ahead of fur-laden sleighs, and 
of troops of olive -skinned French - Canadian girls, 
bundled up from their feet to those mischievous feat- 
ures which shot roguish glances at' the artist — the 
biggest man, the people said, who had ever been seen 
in Mattawa. But the place will ever yield back to 
my mind the impression I got of the wonderful prep- 



78 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

arations that were made for our adventure — prepara- 
tions that seemed to busy or to interest nearly every 
one in the village. Our Indians had come in from 
the Indian village thre6 miles away, and had said they 
had had enough drink. Mr. John De Sousa, account- 
ant at the post, took charge of them and of us, and 
the work of loading a great portage sleigh went on 
apace. The men of sporting tastes came out and 
lounged in front of the post, and gave helpful advice; 
the Indians and clerks went to and from the sleigh 
laden with bags of necessaries ; the harness - maker 
made for us belts such as the lumbermen use to pre- 
clude the possibility of incurable strains in the rough 
life in the wilderness. The help at O'Farrall's as- 
sisted in repacking what we needed, so that our 
trunks and town clothing could be stored. Mr. De 
Sousa sent messengers hither and thither for essen- 
tials not in stock at the post. Some women, even, 
were set at work to make " neaps " for us, a neap be- 
ing a sort of slipper or unlaced shoe made of heavy 
blanketing and worn outside one's stockings, to give 
added warmth to the feet. 

" You see, this is no casual rabbit-hunt," said the 
artist. The remark will live in Mattawa many a year. 

The Hudson Bay Company's posts differ. In the 
wilderness they are forts surrounded by stockades, 
but within the boundaries of civilization they are 
stores. That at Winnipeg is a splendid emporium, 
while that at Mattawa is like a village store in the 
United States, except that the top story is laden with 
guns, traps, snow-shoes, and the skins of wild beasts ; 
while an out-building in the rear is the repository of 



ANTOINE S MOOSE-YARD 



79 



scores of birch-bark canoes — the carriages of British 
America. Mr. Rankin, the factor there, lay in a bed 
of sufferins: and could not see us. Yet it seemed 
difficult to believe that we could be made the recipi- 
ents of greater or more kindly attentions than were 
lavished upon us by his accountant, Mr. De Sousa. 
He ordered our tobacco 
ground for us ready for 
our pipes ; selected the 
finest from among those 
extraordinary blankets 
that have been made ex- 
clusively for this com- 
pany for hundreds of 
years ; picked out the 
largest snow-shoes in 
his stock ; bade us lay 
aside the gloves we had 
brought, and take mit- 
tens such as he produced, and for which we thanked 
him in our hearts many times afterwards ; planned 
our outfit of food with the wisdom of an old cam- 
paigner; bethought himself to send for baker's 
bread ; ordered high legs sewed on our moccasins — 
in a word, he made it possible for us to say after- 
wards that absolutely nothing had been overlooked 
or slighted in fitting out our expedition. 

As I sat in the sleigh, tucked in under heavy skins 
and leaning at royal ease against other furs that cov- 
ered a bale of hay, it seemed to me that I had become 
part of one of such pictures as we all have seen, por- 
traying historic expeditions in Russia or Siberia. We 




x-^; 



ANTOINE, FROM IJFE 



8o ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

carried fifteen hundred pounds of traps and provi- 
sions for camping, stabling, and food for men and 
beasts. We were five in all — two hunters, two Ind- 
ians, and a teamster.' We set out with the two huge 
mettlesome horses ahead, the driver on a high seat 
formed of a second bale of hay, ourselves lolling back 
under our furs, and the two Indians striding along 
over the resonant cold snow behind us. It was be- 
mnnino^ to be evident that a orreat deal of effort and 
machinery was needed to " make a hunter " of a city 
man, and that it was going to be done thoroughly — 
two thoughts of a highly flattering nature. 

We were now clad for arctic weather, and perhaps 
nothing except a mummy was ever "so dressed up" 
as we were. We each wore two pairs of the heaviest 
woollen stockings I ever saw, and over them ribbed 
bicycle stockings that came to our knees. Over these 
in turn were our " neaps," and then our moccasins, 
laced tightly around our ankles. We had on two 
suits of flannels of extra thickness, flannel shirts, 
reefing jackets, and "capeaux," as they call their long- 
hooded blanket coats, longer than snow-shoe coats. 
On our heads we had knitted tuques, and on our 
hands mittens and gloves. We were bound for An- 
toine's moose-yard, near Crooked Lake. 

The explanation of the term "moose-yard" made 
moose-hunting appear a simple operation (once we 
were started), for a moose-yard is the feeding-ground 
of a herd of moose, and our head Indian, Alexandre 
Antoine, knew where there was one. Each herd or 
family of these great wild cattle has two such feeding- 
grounds, and they are said to go alternately from one 



ANTOINES MOOSE-YARD 8l 

to the Other, never herding in one place two years in 
succession. In this region of Canada they weigh be- 
tween 600 and 1200 pounds, and the reader will help 
his comprehension of those figures by recalling the 
fact that a 1200-pound horse is a very large one. 
Whether they desert a yard for twelve months be- 
cause of the damage they do to the supply of food it 
offers to them, or whether it is instinctive caution 
that directs their movements, no one can more than 
conjecture. 

Their yards are always where soft wood is plenti- 
ful and water is near, and during a winter they will 
feed over a region from half a mile to a mile square. 
The prospect of going directly to the fixed home of 
a herd of moose almost robbed the trip of that specu- 
lative element that gives the greatest zest to hunting. 
But we knew not what the future held for us. Not 
even the artist, with all his experience, conjectured 
what was in store for us. And what was to come be- 
gan coming almost immediately. 

The journey began upon a good highway, over 
which we slid along as comfortably as any ladies in 
their carriages, and with the sleigh - bells flinging 
their cheery music out over a desolate valley, with 
a leaden river at the bottom, and with small mount- 
ains rollinor all about. The timber was cut off them, 
except here and there a few red or white pines that 
reared their green, brush -like tops against the gen- 
eral blanket of snow. The dull sky hung sullenly 
above, and now and then a raven flew by, croaking 
hoarse disapproval of our intrusion. To warn us of 
what we were to expect, Antoine had made a shy 

6 



82 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

Indian joke, one of the few I ever heard: " In small 
little while," said he, "we come to all sorts ot a road. 
Me call it that 'cause you get every sort riding, then 
you sure be suited." 

At five miles out we came to this remarkable hioh- 
wa}'. It can no more be adequately described here 
than could the experiences of a man who goes over 
Niagara Falls in a barrel. The reader must try to 
imagine the most primitive sort of a highway con- 
ceivable — one that has been made by merely felling 
trees through a forest in a path wide enough for a 
team and wagon. All the tree stumps were left in 
their places, and every here and there were rocks ; 
some no larger than a bale of cotton, and some as 
small as a bushel basket. To add to the other allur- 
ing qualities of the road, there were tree trunks now 
and then directly across it, and, as a further induce- 
ment to traffic, the highway was frequently interrupt- 
ed by " pitch holes." Some of these would be called 
pitch holes anywhere. They were at points where 
a rill crossed the road, or the road crossed the corner 
of a marsh. But there were other pitch holes that 
any intelligent New Yorker would call ravines or 
gullies. These were at points where one hill ran 
down to the water-level and another immediately rose 
precipitately, there being a watercourse between the 
two. In all such places there was deep black mud 
and broken ice. However, these were mere features 
of the character of this road — a character too pro- 
found for me to hope to portray it. When the road 
was not inclined either straight down or straight up, 
it coursed along the slanting side of a steep hill, so 



ANTOINES MOOSE-YARD 



83 



that a vehicle could keep to it only by falling against 
the forest at the under side and carromino; alono: 
from tree to tree. 

Such was the road. The manner of travelling it 
was quite as astounding. For nothing short of what 
Alphonse, the teamster, did would I destroy a man's 
character; but Alphonse was the next thing to an 
idiot. He made 
that dreadful 
journey at a gal- 
lop! The first 




THE PORTAGE SLEIGH ON A 
LUMBER ROAD 



time he upset 
the sleigh and 
threw me with 
one leg thigh-deep be- 
tween a stone and a 
tree trunk, besides 
sending the artist fly- 
ing over my head like a shot from a sling, he reseat- 
ed himself and remarked: "That makes tree time I 
upset in dat place. Hi, there! Get up!" It never 
occurred to him to stop because a giant tree had 
fallen across the trail. "Look out! Hold tight!" he 
would call out, and then he would take the obstruc- 



84 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

tion at a jump. The horses were mammoth beasts, 
in the best fettle, and the sleigh was of the solidest, 
strongest pattern. There were places where even 
Alphonse was anxious to drive with caution. Such 
were the ravines and unbridged waterways. But one 
of the horses had cut himself badly in such a place a 
year before, and both now made it a rule to take all 
such places flying. Fancy the result! The leap in 
air, and then the crash of the sled as it landed, the 
snap of the harness chains, the snorts of the winded 
beasts, the yells of the driver, the anxiety and nerv- 
ousness of the passengers ! 

At one point we had an exciting adventure of a 
far different sort. There was a moderately good 
stretch of road ahead, and we invited the Indians to 
jump in and ride a while. We noticed that they took 
occasional draughts from a bottle. They finished a 
full pint, and presently Alexandre produced another 
and larger phial. Every one knows what a drunken 
Indian is, and so did we. We ordered the sleigh 
stopped and all hands out for "a talk." Firmly, but 
with both power and reason on our side, we demand- 
ed a promise that not another drink should be taken, 
or that the horses be turned towards Mattawa at 
once. The promise was freely given. 

" But what is that stuff ? Let me see it," one of 
the hunters asked. 

" It is de 'igh wine," said Alexandre. 

"High winc^* Alcohol.''" exclaimed the hunter, 
and, impulse being quicker than reason sometimes, 
fluns the bottle hi2:h in air into the bush. It was an 
injudicious action, but both of us at once prepared to 



ANTOINE S MOOSE -YARD 85 

defend and re-enforce it, of course. As it happened, 
the Indians saw that no unkindness or unfairness 
was intended, and neither sulked nor made trouble 
afterwards. 

We were now deep in the bush. Occasionally we 
passed "a brule," or tract denuded of trees, and lit- 
tered with trunks and tops of trunks rejected by the 
lumbermen. But every mile took us nearer to the 
undisturbed primeval forest, where the trees shoot 
up forty feet before the branches begin. There were 
no houses, teams, or men. In a week in the bush 
we saw no other sign of civilization than what we 
brought or made. All around us rose the motion- 
less regiments of the forest, with the snow beneath 
them, and their branches and twigs printing lace- 
work on the sky. The signs of game were numerous, 
and varied to an extent that I never heard of before. 
There were few spaces of the length of twenty- five 
feet in which the track of some wild beast or bird 
did not cross the road. The Indians read this writ- 
ing in the snow, so that the forest was to them as a 
book would be to us. " What is that ?" "And that ?" 
"And that ?" I kept inquiring. The answers told 
more eloquently than any man can describe it the 
story of the abundance of game in that easily acces- 
sible wilderness. " Dat red deer," Antoine replied. 
" Him fox." " Dat bear track ; dat squirrel ; dat rab- 
bit." " Dat moose track ; pass las' week." " Dat pa'- 
tridge; dat wolf." Or perhaps it was the trail of a 
marten, or a beaver, or a weasel, or a fisher, mink, 
lynx, or otter that he pointed out, for all these "signs" 
were there, and nearly all were repeated again and 

6* 



86 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

again. Of the birds that are plentiful there the 
principal kinds are partridge, woodcock, crane, geese, 
duck, gull, loon, and owl. 

When the sun set we prepared to camp, selecting a 
spot near a tiny rill. The horses .were tethered to a 
tree, with their harness still on, and blankets thrown 
over them. We cleared a little space by the road- 
side, using our snow-shoes for shovels. The Indians, 
with their axes, turned up the moss and leaves, and 
levelled the small shoots and brushwood. Then one 
went off to cut balsam boughs for bedding, while the 
other set up two crotched sticks, with a pole upon 
them resting in the crotches, and throwing the can- 
vas of an "A" tent over the frame, he looped the bot- 
tom of the tent to small pegs, and banked snow 
lightly all around it. The little aromatic branches 
of balsam were laid evenly upon the ground, a fur 
robe was thrown upon the leaves, our enormous 
blankets were spread half open side by side, and two 
coats were rolled up and thrown down for pillows. 
Pierre, the second Indian, made tiny slivers of some 
soft wood, and tried to start a fire. He failed. Then 
Alexandre Antoine brought two handfuls of bark, 
and lighting a small piece with a match, proceeded 
to build a fire in the most painstaking manner, and 
with an ingenuity that was most interesting. First 
he made a fire that could have been started in a tea- 
cup ; then he built above and around it a skeleton 
tent of bits of soft wood, six to nine inches in length. 
This gave him a fire of the dimensions of a high hat. 
Next, he threw down two great bits of timber, one 
on either side of the fire, and a still larger back log, 







THE TRACK IN THE WTNIER FOREST 



ANTOINE S MOOSE-YARD 89 

and upon these he heaped split soft wood. While 
this was being done, Pierre assailed one great tree 
after another, and brought them crashing down with 
noises that startled the forest quiet. Alphonse had 
opened the provision bags, and presently two tin pails 
filled with water swung from saplings over the fire, 
and a pan of fat salt pork was frizzling upon the blaz. 
ing wood. The darkness grew dead black, and the 
dancing frames peopled the near forest with dodging 
shadows. Almost in the time it has taken me to 
write it, we were squatting on our heels around the 
fire, each with a massive cutting of bread, a slice of 
fried pork in a tin plate, and half a pint of tea, pre- 
cisely as hot as molten lead, in a tin cup. Supper 
was a necessity, not a luxury, and was hurried out of 
the way accordingly. Then the men built their camp 
beside ours in front of the fire, and followed that by 
felling three or more monarchs of the bush. Noth- 
ing surprised me so much as the amount of wood 
consumed in these open-air fires. In five days at 
our permanent camp we made a great hole in the 
forest. 

But that first night in the open air, abed with nat- 
ure, with British America for a bedroom ! Only I 
can tell of it, for the others slept. The stillness was 
intense. There was no wind, and not an animal or 
bird uttered a cry. The logs cracked and sputtered 
and popped, the horses shook their chains, the men 
all snored — white and red alike. The horses pounded 
the hollow earth ; the logs broke and fell upon the 
cinders ; one of the men talked in his sleep. But 
over and through it all the stillness grew. Then the 



90 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

fire sank low, the cold became intense, the light was 
lost, and the darkness swallowed everything. Some 
one got up awkwardly, with muttering, and flung 
wood upon the red ashes, and presently all that had 
passed was re-experienced. 

The ride next day was more exciting than the 
first stage. It was like the journey of a gun-carriage 
across country in a hot retreat. The sled was actu- 
ally upset only once, but to prevent that happening 
fifty times the Indians kept springing at the upper- 
most side of the flying vehicle, and hanging to the 
side poles to pull the toppling construction down 
upon both runners. Often we were advised to leap 
out for safety's sake ; at other times we wished we 
had leaped out. For seven hours we were flung 
about like cotton spools that are being polished in 
a revolving cylinder. And yet we were obliged to 
run long distances after the hurtling sleigh — long 
enough to tire us. The artist, who had spent years 
in rude scenes among rough men, said nothing at the 
time. What was the use } But afterwards, in New 
York, he remarked that this was the roughest travel- 
ling he had ever experienced. 

The signs of game increased. Deer and bear and 
wolf and fox and moose were evidently numerous 
around us. Once we stopped, and the Indians be- 
came excited. What they had taken for old moose 
tracks were the week-old footprints of a man. It 
seems strange, but they felt obliged to know what a 
man had gone into the bush for a week ago. They 
followed the signs, and came back smiling. He had 
gone in to cut hemlock boughs; we would find traces 



ANTOINES MOOSE-YARD 



91 



of a camp near by. We 
did. In a country where 
men are so few, they busy 
themselves about one an- 
other. Four or five days 
later, while we were hunt- 
ing, these Indians came 
to the road and stopped 
suddenly, as horses do 
when lassoed. With a 
glance they read that 
two teams had passed 
during the night, go- 
ing towards our camp. 
When we returned to 
camp the teams had 
been there, and our 
teamster had talked with 
the drivers. Therefore 

that load was lifted from the minds of our Indians. 
But their knowledge of the bush was marvellous. 
One point in the woods was precisely like another 
to us, yet the Indians would leap off the sleigh now 
and then and dive into the forest, to return with a 
trap hidden there months before, or to find a great 
iron kettle. 

" Do you never get lost }'' I asked Alexandre. 

" Me get los'.? No, no get los'." 

" But how do you find your way }'' 

" Me fin' way easy. Me know way me come, or 
me follow my tracks, or me know by de sun. If no 
sun, me look at trees. Trees grow more branches 




PIERRE, FROM LIFE 



92 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

on side toward sun, and got rough bark on north 
side. At night me know by see de stars." 

We camped in a log-hut Alexandre had built for 
a hunting camp. It was very picturesque and sub- 
stantial, built of huge logs, and caulked with moss. 
It had a great earthen bank in the middle for a fire- 
place, with an equally large opening in the roof, 
boarded several feet high at the sides to form a 
chimney. At one corner of the fire bank was an in- 
genious crane, capable of being raised and lowered, 
and projecting from a pivoted post, so that the long 
arm could be swung over or away from the fire. At 
one end of the single apartment were two roomy 
bunks built against the wall. With extraordinary 
skill and quickness the Indians whittled a spade out 
of a board, performing the task with an axe, an im- 
plement they can use as white men use a penknife, 
an implement they value more highly than a gun. 
They made a broom of balsam boughs, and dug 
and swept the dirt off the floor and walls, speedily 
makinof the cabin neat and clean. Two new bunks 
were put up for us, and bedded with balsam boughs 
and skins. Shelves were already up, and spread 
with pails and bottles, tin cups and plates, knives and 
forks, canned goods, etc. On them and on the floor 
were our stores. 

We had a week's outfit, and we needed it, because 
for five days we could not hunt on account of the 
crust on the snow, which made such a noise when 
a human foot broke through it that we could not 
have approached any wild animal within half a mile. 
On the third day it rained, but without melting the 




ANTOINE S CABIN 



ANTOINES MOOSE-YARD 95 

crust. On the fourth clay it snowed furiously, bury- 
ing the crust under two inches of snow. On the 
fifth day we got our moose. 

In the mean time the log -cabin was our home. 
Alexandre and Pierre cut down trees every day for 
the fire, and Pierre disappeared for hours every now 
and then to look after traps set for otter, beaver, and 
marten. Alphonse attended his horses and served 
as cook. He could produce hotter tea than any 
other man in the world. I took mine for a walk in 
the arctic cold three times a day, the artist learned 
to pour his from one cup to another with amazing 
dexterity, and the Indians (who drank a quart each 
of ofreen tea at each meal because it was stronger 
than our black tea) lifted their pans and threw the 
liquid fire down throats that had been inured to 
high wines. Whenever the fire was low, the cold 
was intense. Whenever it was heaped with logs, all 
the heat flew directly through the roof, and spiral 
blasts of cold air were sucked through every crack 
between logs in the cabin walls. Whenever the 
door opened, the cabin filled with smoke. Smoke 
clung to all we ate or wore. At night the fire kept 
burning out, and we arose with chattering teeth to 
build it anew. The Indians were then to be seen 
with their blankets pushed down to their knees, 
asleep in their shirts and trousers. At meal-times 
we had bacon or pork, speckled or lake trout, bread- 
and-butter, stewed tomatoes, and tea. There were 
two stools for the five men, but they only compli- 
cated the discomfort of those who got them ; for it 
was found that if we put our tin plates on our knees. 



96 



ON CANADA'S FRONTIER 



they fell off ; if we held them in one hand, we could 
not cut the pork and hold the bread with the other 
hand ; while if we put the plates on the floor be- 
side the tea, we could not reach them. In a month 
we might have solved the problem. Life in that log 
shanty was precisely the life of the early settlers of 
this country. It was bound to produce great char- 
acters or early death. There could be no middle 
course with such an existence. 

Partridge fed in the brush impudently before us. 
Rabbits bobbed about in the clearing before the 
door. Squirrels sat upon the logs near by and gor- 
mandized and chattered. Great saucy birds, like 
mouse-colored robins, and known to the Indians as 
" meat-birds," stole our provender if we left it out-of- 
doors half an hour, and one day we saw a red deer 
jump in the bush a hundred yards away. Yet we got 
no game, because we knew there was a moose-yard 
within two miles on one side and within three miles 
on the other, and we dared not shoot our rifles lest 
we frishten the moose. Moose was all we were 
after. There was a lake near by, and the trout in 
those lakes up there attain remarkable size and 
numbers. We heard of 35-pound speckled trout, of 
lake trout twice as large, and of enormous muskal- 
longe. The most reliable persons told of lakes far- 
ther in the wilderness where the trout are thick as 
salmon in the British Columbia streams — so thick as 
to seem to fill the water. We were near a lake that 
was supposed to have been fished out by lumbermen 
a year before, yet it was no sport at all to fish there. 
With a short stick and two yards of line and a bass 



ANTOIXES MOOSE-VARD 99 

hook baited with pork, we brought up four -pound 
and five-pound beauties faster than we wanted them 
for food. Truly we were in a splendid hunting 
countr}^ like the Adirondacks eighty years ago, but 
thousands of times as extensive. 

Finally we started for moose. Our Indians asked 
if they might take their guns. We gave the permis- 
sion. Alexandre, a thin, wiry man of forty years, car- 
ried an old Henry rifle in a woollen case open at one 
end like a stocking. He wore a short blanket coat 
and tuque, and trousers tied tight below the knee, 
and let into his moccasin-tops. He and his brother 
Fran9ois are famous Hudson Bay Company trappers, 
and are two-thirds Algonquin and one-third French. 
He has a typical swarthy, angular Indian face and a 
French mustache and goatee. Naturally, if not by 
rank, a leader among his men, his manner is com- 
manding and his appearance grave. He talks bad 
French fluently, and makes wTetched headway in 
English. Pierre is a short, thickset, walnut- stained 
man of thirty-five, almost pure Indian, and almost a 
perfect specimen of physical development. He sel- 
dom spoke while on this trip, but he impressed us 
with his strength, endurance, quickness, and knowl- 
edge of woodcraft. Poor fellow ! he had only a shot- 
gun, which he loaded with buckshot. It had no 
case, and both men carried their pieces grasped by 
the barrels and shouldered, with the butts behind 
them. 

We set out in Indian-file, plunging at once into 
the bush. Never was forest scener}'^ more exqui- 
sitely beautiful than on that morning as the day 



lOO ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

broke, for we breakfasted at four o'clock, and started 
immediately afterwards. Everywhere the view was 
fairy -like. There was not snow enough for snow- 
shoeing. But the fresh fall of snow was immacu- 
lately white, and flecked the scene apparently from 
earth to sky, for there was not a branch or twig or 
limb or spray of evergreen, or wart or fungous growth 
upon any tree that did not bear its separate burden 
of snow. It was a bridal dress, not a winding-sheet, 
that Dame Nature was trying on that morning. And 
in the bright fresh green of the firs and pines we saw 
her complexion peeping out above her spotless gown, 
as one sees the rosy cheeks or black eyes of a girl 
wrapped in ermine. 

Mile after mile we walked, up mountain and down 
dale, slapped in the faces by twigs, knocking snow 
down the backs of our necks, slipping knee-deep in 
bog mud, tumbling over loose stones, climbing across 
interlaced logs, dropping to the height of one thigh 
between tree trunks, sliding, falling, tight-rope walk- 
ing on branches over thin ice, but forever following 
the cat-like tread of Alexandre, with his seven-league 
stride and long-winded persistence. Suddenly we 
came to a queer sort of clearing dotted with protu- 
berances like the bubbles on molasses beginning to 
boil. It was a beaver meadow. The bumps in the 
snow covered stumps of trees the beavers had gnawed 
down. The Indians were looking at some trough 
like tracks in the snow, like the trail of a tired man 
who had dragged his heels. " Moose ; going this 
way," said Alexandre ; and we turned and walked in 
the tracks. Across the meadow and across a lake 



ANTOINE S MOOSE-YARD 



103 



and up another mountain they led us. Then we 
came upon fresher prints. At each new track the 
Indians stooped, and making a scoop of one hand, 
brushed the new-fallen snow lightly out of the in- 
dentations. Thus they read the time at which the 
print was made. " Las' week," " Day 'fore yester- 
day," they whispered. Presently they bent over 
again, the light snow flew, and one whispered, " This 
morning." 

Stealthily Alexandre swept ahead ; very carefully 
we followed. We dared not break a twig, or speak, 
or slip, or stumble. As it was, the breaking of the 
crust was still far too audible. We followed a little 
stream, and approached a thick growth of tamarack. 
We had no means of knowing that a herd of moose 
was lying in that thicket, resting after feeding. We 
knew it afterwards. Alexandre motioned to us to 




ON THE MOOSE TRAIL 



I04 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

get our guns ready. We each threw a cartridge 
from the cyHnder into the barrel, making a " click, 
click " that was abominably loud. Alexandre forged 
ahead. In five minutes we heard him call aloud : 
" Moose gone. We los' him." We hastened to his 
side. He pointed at some tracks in which the prints 
were closer together than any we had seen. 

"See! he trot," Alexandre explained. 

In another five minutes we had all but completed 
a circle, and were on the other side of the tamarack 
thicket. And there were the prints of the bodies of 
the great beasts. We could see even the imprint of 
the hair of their coats. All around were broken 
twigs and balsam needles. The moose had left the 
branches ragged, and on ever}^ hand the young bark 
was chewed or rubbed raw. Loading our rifles had 
lost us a herd of moose. 

Back once again at the beaver dam, Alexandre 
and Pierre studied the moose -tramped snow and 
talked earnestly. They agreed that a desperate bat- 
tle had been fousfht there between two bull moose a 
week before, and that those bulls were not in the 
" yard " where we had blundered. They examined 
the tracks over an acre or more, and then strode off 
at an obtuse angle from our former trail. Pierre, ap- 
parently not quite satisfied, kept dropping behind or 
disappearing in the bush at one side of us. So mag- 
nificent was his skill at his work that I missed him 
at times, and at other times found him putting his 
feet down where mine were lifted up without ever 
hearing a sound of his step or of his contact with 
the undergrowth. Alexandre presently motioned us 



ANTOINES MOOSE-YARD I07 

with a warning gesture. He slowed his pace to 
short steps, with long pauses between. He saw 
everything that moved, heard every sound ; only a 
deer could throw more and keener faculties into play 
than this born hunter. He heard a twig snap. We 
heard nothing. Pierre was away on a side search. 
Alexandre motioned us to be ready. We crept close 
together, and I scarcely breathed. We moved cau- 
tiously, a step at a time, like chessmen. It was im- 
possible to get an unobstructed view a hundred feet 
ahead, so thick was the soft-wood growth. It seemed 
out of the question to try to shoot that distance. 
We were descending a hill-side into marshy ground. 
We crossed a corner of a grove of young alders, and 
saw before us a gentle slope thickly grown with 
evergreen — tamarack, the artist called it. Suddenly 
Alexandre bent forward and raised his gun. Two 
steps forward gave us his view. Five moose were 
fifty yards away, alarmed and ready to run. ■ A big 
bull in the front of the group had already thrown 
back his antlers. By impulse rather than through 
reason I took aim at a second bull. He was half a 
height lower down the slope, and to be seen through 
a web of thin foliage. Alexandre and the artist fired 
as with a single pull at one trigger. The foremost 
bull staggered and fell forward, as if his knees had 
been broken. He was hit twice — in the heart and 
in the neck. The second bull and two cows and a 
calf plunged into the bush and disappeared. Pierre 
found that bull a mile away, shot through the lungs. 
It had taken us a week to kill our moose in a 
country where they were common game. That was 



I08 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

" hunter's luck " with a vengeance. But at another 
season such a delay could scarcely occur. The time 
to visit that district is in the autumn, before snow 
falls. Then in a week one ought to be able to bag 
a moose, and move into the region where caribou 
are plenty. 

Mr. Remington, in the picture called " Hunting the 
Caribou," depicts a scene at a critical moment in the 
experience of any man who has journeyed on west- 
ward of where we found our moose, to hunt the cari- 
bou. There is a precise moment for shooting in the 
chase of all animals of the deer kind, and when that 
moment has been allowed to pass, the chance of se- 
curing the animal diminishes with astonishing rapid- 
ity — with more than the rapidity with which the then 
startled animal is making his flight, because to his 
flight you must add the increasing ambush of the 
forest. What is true of caribou in this respect is true 
of moose and red deer, elk and musk-ox in America, 
and of all the horned animals of the forests of the 
other great hemisphere. Every hunter who sees Mr. 
Remington's realistic picture knows at a glance that 
the two men have stolen noiselessly to within easy 
rifle-shot of a caribou, and that suddenly, at the last 
moment, the animal has heard them. 

Perhaps he has seen them, and is standing — still 
as a Barye bronze — with his great, soft, wondering 
eyes riveted upon theirs. That is a situation famil- 
iar to every hunter. His prey has been browsing in 
fancied security, and yet with that nervous prudence 
that causes these timid beasts to keep forever rais- 
ing their heads, and sweeping the view around them 




with their exquisite sight, and analyzing the atmos- 
phere with their magical sense of smell. In one of 
these cautious pauses the caribou has seen the hunt- 
ers. Both hunters and hunted seem instantly to 
turn to stone. Neither moves a muscle or a hair. If 
the knee or the foot of one of the men presses too 
hard upon a twig and it snaps, the caribou is as cer- 
tain to throw his head high up and dart into the in- 
gulfing net-work of the forest trunks and brush as 
day is certain to follow night. But when no move- 
ment has been made and no mishap has alarmed the 
beast, it has often happened that the two or more 
parties to this strangely thrilling situation have held 
their places for minutes at a stretch — minutes that 
seemed like quarters of an hour. In such cases the 
deer or caribou has been known to lower his head 
and feed again, assured in its mind that the suspect- 



no ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

ed hunter is inanimate and harmless. Nine times in- 
ten, though, the first to move is the beast, which 
tosses up its head, and " Shoot ! shoot !" is the in- 
stant command, for the upward throwing of the head 
is a movement made to put the beast's great antlers 
into position for flight through the forest. 

The caribou has very wide, heavy horns, and they 
are almost always circular — that is, the main part or 
trunk of each horn curves outward from the skull 
and then inward towards the point, in an almost true 
semicircle. They are more or less branched, but 
both the general shape of the whole horns and of the 
branches is such that when the head is thrown up 
and back they aid the animal's flight by presenting 
what may be called the point of a wedge towards the 
saplings and limbs and small forest growths through 
which the beast runs, parting and spreading every 
pair of obstacles to either side, and bending every 
single one out of the way of his flying body. The 
caribou of North America is the reindeer of Green- 
land ; the differences between the two are very slight. 
The animal's home is the arctic circle, but in Amer- 
ica it feeds and roams farther south than in Europe 
and Asia. It is a large and clumsy -looking beast, 
with thick and rather short legs and bulky body, and, 
seen in repose, gives no hint of its capacity for flight. 
Yet the caribou can run " like a streak of wind," and 
makes its way through leaves and brush and brittle, 
sapless vegetation with a modicum of noise so slight 
as to seem inexplicable. Nature has ingeniously 
added to its armament, always one, and usually two, 
palmated spurs at the root of its horns, and these 



ANTOINES MOOSE- YARD II3 

grow at an obtuse angle with the head, upward and 
outward towards the nose. With these spurs — Hke 
shovels used sideways — the caribou roots up the 
snow, or breaks its crust and disperses it, to get at 
his food on the ground. The caribou are very large 
deer, and their strength is attested by the weight of 
their horns. I have handled caribou horns in Can- 
ada that I could not hold out with both hands when 
seated in a chair. It seemed hard to believe that an 
animal of the size of a caribou could carry a burden 
apparently so disproportioned to his head and neck. 
But it is still more difficult to believe, as all the 
woodsmen say, that these horns are dropped and 
new ones grown every year. 

It is not the especial beauty of Frederic Reming- 
ton's drawings and paintings that they are absolutely 
accurate in every detail, but it is one of their beau- 
ties, and gives them especial value apart from their 
artistic excellence. He draws what he knows, and 
he knows w^hat he draws. This scene of the electri- 
cally exquisite moment in a hunter's life, when great 
game is before him, and the instant has come for 
claiming it as his own with a steadily held and wise- 
ly chosen aim, will give the reader a perfect knowl- 
edge of how the Indians and hunters dress and equip 
themselves beyond the Canadian border. The scene 
is in the wilderness north of the Great Lakes. The 
Indian is of one of those tribes that are offshoots of 
the great Algonquin nation. He carries in that load 
he bears that which the plainsmen call " the grub 
stake," or quota of provisions for himself and his em- 
ployer, as well as blankets to sleep in, pots, pans, 



114 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

sugar, the inevitable tea of those latitudes, and much 
else besides. Those Indians are not as lazy or as 
physically degenerate as many of the tribes in our 
country. They turn themselves into wonderful beasts 
of burden, and go forever equipped with a long, broad 
strap that they call a " tomp line," and which they 
pass around their foreheads and around their packs, 
the latter resting high up on their backs. It seems 
incredible, but they can carry one hundred to one 
hundred and fifty pounds of necessaries all day long 
in the roughest regions. The Hudson Bay Company 
made their ancestors its wards and dependents two 
centuries ago, and taught them to work and to earn 
their livelihood. 



BIG FISHING 

IN October every year there are apt to be more 
fish upon the land in the Nepigon country than 
one would suppose could find life in the waters. 
Most families have laid in their full winter supply, 
the main exceptions being those semi-savage families 
which leave their fish out — in preference to laying 
them in — upon racks whereon they are to be seen in 
rows and by the thousands. 

Nepigon, the old Hudson Bay post which is the 
outfitting place for this region, is 928 miles west 
of Montreal, on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and 
on an arm of Lake Superior. The Nepigon River, 
which connects the greatest of lakes with Lake Ne- 
pigon, is the only roadway in all that country, and 
therefore its mouth, in an arm of the great lake, is 
the front door to that wonderful region. In travel- 
ling through British Columbia I found one district 
that is going to prove of greater interest to gentle- 
men sportsmen with the rod, but I know of no great- 
er fishing country than the Nepigon. No single 
waterway or system of navigable inland waters in 
North America is likely to wrest the palm from this 
Nepigon district as the haunt of fish in the greatest 
plenty, unless we term the salmon a fresh-water fish, 
and thus call the Fraser, Columbia, and Skeena riv- 



ii6 ON Canada's frontier 

ers into the rivaliy. There is incessant fishing in 
this wilderness north of Lake Superior from New- 
year's Day, when the ice has to be cut to get at the 
water, all through the succeeding seasons, until again 
the ice fails to protect the game. And there is ev- 
ery sort of fishing between that which engages a 
navv of sailinor vessels and men, down throus^h all 
the methods of fish-taking — by nets, by spearing, 
still fishing, and fly-fishing. A half a dozen sorts of 
finny game succumb to these methods, and though 
the region has been famous and therefore much vis- 
ited for nearly a dozen years, the field is so extensive, 
so well stocked, and so difficult of access except to 
persons of means, that even to-day almost the very 
largest known specimens of each class of fish are to 
be had there. 

If we could put on wings early in October, and 
could fly down from James's Bay over the dense for- 
ests and countless lakes and streams of western On- 
tario, we would see now and then an Indian or hunt- 
er in a canoe, here and there a lonely huddle of small 
houses forming a Hudson Bay post, and at even 
greater distances apart small bunches of the cotton 
or birch-bark tepees of pitiful little Cree or Ojibaway 
bands. But with the first glance at the majestic ex- 
panse of Lake Superior there would burst upon the 
view scores upon scores of white sails upon the wa- 
ter, and near by, upon the shore, a tent for nearly 
every sail. That is the time for the annual gather- 
ing for catching the big, chunky, red-fleshed fish they 
call the salmon-trout. They catch those that weigh 
from a dozen to twenty-five or thirty pounds, and at 



RIG FISHING 



117 



this time of the year their flesh is comparatively 
hard. 

Engaged in making this great catch are the boats 
of the Indians from far up the Nepigon and the 
neighboring streams ; of the chance white men of 
the region, who depend upon nature for their suste- 
nance ; and of Finns, Norwegians, Swedes, and oth- 
ers who come from the United States side, or south- 
ern shore, to fish for their home markets. These 
fish come at this season to spawn, seeking the reefs, 
which are plentiful off the shore in this part of the 
lake. Gill nets are used to catch them, and are set 
within five fathoms of the surface by setting the in- 
ner buoy in w^ater of that depth, and then paying the 
net out into deeper water and anchoring it. The 
run and the fishing continue throughout October. 
As a rule, among the Canadians and Canada Ind- 
ians a family goes with each boat — the boats being 
sloops of twenty-seven to thirty feet in length, and 
capable of carrying fifteen pork barrels, which are at 
the outset filled wath rock-salt. Sometimes the heads 
of two families are partners in the ownership of one 
of these sloops, but, however that may be, the cus- 
tom is for the women and children to camp in tents 
along-shore, while the men (usually two men and a 
boy for each boat) work the nets. It is a stormy 
season of the year, and the work is rough and haz- 
ardous, especially for the nets, which are frequently 
lost. 

Whenever a haul is made the fish are split down 
the back and cleaned. Then they are washed, rolled 
in salt, and packed in the barrels. Three days later. 



Il8 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

when the bodies of the fish have thoroughly purged 
themselves, they are taken out, washed again, and 
are once more rolled in fresh salt and put back in 
the barrels, which are then filled to the top with wa- 
ter. The Indians subsist all winter upon this Octo- 
ber catch, and, in addition, manage to exchange a 
few barrels for other provisions and for clothing. 
They demand an equivalent of six dollars a barrel 
in whatever they get in exchange, but do not sell 
for money, because, as I understand it, they are not 
obliged to pay the provincial license fee as fishermen, 
and therefore may not fish for the market. Even 
sportsmen who throw a fly for one day in the Nepi- 
gon country must pay the Government for the privi- 
lege. The Indians told me that eight barrels of 
these fish will last a family of six persons an entire 
winter. Such a demonstration of prudence and fore- 
thought as this, of a month's fishing at the threshold 
of winter, amounts to is a rare one for an Indian to 
make, and I imagine there is a strong admixture of 
white blood in most of those who make it. The full- 
bloods will not take the trouble. They trust to their 
guns and their traps against the coming of that wolf 
which they are not unused to facing. 

Up along the shores of Lake Nepigon, which is 
thirty miles by an air line north of Lake Superior, 
many of the Indians lay up white-fish for winter. 
They catch them in nets and cure them by frost. 
They do not clean them. They simply make a hole 
in the tail end of each fish, and string them, as 
if they were beads, upon sticks, which they set up 
into racks. They usually hang the fishes in rows 




3^(f||fl,T,H - 



INDIANS HAULING NETS ON LAKE NEPIGON 



of ten, and frequently store up thousands while they 
are at it. The Reverend Mr. Renison, who has had 
much to do with bettering the condition of these 
Indians, told me that he had caught 1020 pounds 
of white-fish in two nights with two gill nets in 
Lake Nepigon. It is unnecessary to add that he 
cleaned his. 

Lake Nepigon is about seventy miles in length, 
and two-thirds as wide, at the points of its greatest 
measurement, and is a picturesque body of water, 
surrounded by forests and dotted with islands. It is 



I20 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

a famous haunt for trout, and those fishermen who 
are lucky may at times see scores of great beauties 
lying upon the bottom ; pr, with a good guide and at 
the right season, may be taken to places where the 
water is fairly astir with them. Fishermen who are 
not lucky may get their customary experience with- 
out travelling so far, for the route is by canoe, on 
top of nearly a thousand miles of railroading; and 
one mode of locomotion consumes nearly as much 
time as the other, despite the difference between 
the respective distances travelled. The speckled 
trout in the lake are locally reported to weigh from 
three to nine pounds, but the average stranger will 
lift in more of three pounds' weight than he will of 
nine. Yet whatever they average, the catching of 
them is prime sport as you float upon the water in 
your picturesque birch-bark canoe, with your guide 
paddling you noiselessly along, and your spoon or 
artificial minnow rippling through the water or glint- 
ing in the sunlight. You need a stout bait-rod, for 
the gluttonous fish are game, and make a good fight 
every time. The local fishermen catch the speckled 
beauties with an unpoetic lump of pork. 

A lively French Canadian whom I met on the 
cars on my way to Nepigon described that region as 
" de mos' tareeble place for de fish in all over de 
worl'." And he added another remark which had at 
least the same amount of truth at the bottom of it. 
Said he: "You weel find dere dose Mees Nancy 
feeshermans from der Unite State, vhich got dose 
hunderd-dollar poles and dose leetle humbug flies, 
vhich dey t'row around and pull 'em back again, like 



BIG FISHING 121 

dey was afraid some feesh would bite it. Dat is all 
one grand stupeedity. Dose man vhich belong dere 
put on de hook some pork, and catch one tareeble 

pile of fish. Dey don't give a about style, only 

to catch dose feesh." 

To be sure, every fisherman who prides himself 
on the distance he can cast, and who owns a splen- 
did outfit, will despise the spirit of that French Ca- 
nadian's speech; yet up in that country many a sci- 
entific angler has endured a failure of " bites " for a 
long and weary time, while his guide was hauling in 
fish a-plenty, and has come to question " science " for 
the nonce, and follow the Indian custom. For gray 
trout (the namaycush, or lake trout) they bait with 
apparently anything edible that is handiest, prefer- 
ring pork, rabbit, partridge, the meat of the trout it- 
self, or of the sucker ; and the last they take first, if 
possible. The suckers, by-the-way, are all too plenty, 
and as full of bones as any old-time frigate ever was 
with timbers. You may see the Indians eating them 
and discarding the bones at the same time ; and they 
make the process resemble the action of a hay-cutter 
when the grass is going in long at one side, and 
coming out short, but in equal quantities, at the 
other. 

The namaycush of Nepigon weigh from nine to 
twenty-five pounds. The natives take a big hook 
and bait it, and then run the point into a piece of 
shiny, newly-scraped lead. They never " play " their 
bites, but give them a tight line and steady pull. 
These fish make a game struggle, leaping and diving 
and thrashing the water until the gaff ends the strug- 



122 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

gle. In winter there is as good sport with the na- 
maycush, and it is managed pecuHarly. The Indians 
cut into the ice over deep water, making holes at 
least ei2:hteen inches in diameter. Across the hole 
they lay a stick, so that when they pull up a trout 
the line will run along the stick, and the fish will hit 
that obstruction instead of the resistant ice. If a 
fish struck the ice the chances are nine to one that 
it would tear off the hook. Havino- baited a hook 
with pork, and stuck the customary bit of lead upon 
it, they sound for bottom, and then measure the line 
so that it will reach to about a foot and a half above 
soundings — that is to say, off bottom. Then they be- 
gin fishing, and their plan is (it is the same all over 
the Canadian wilderness) to keep jerking the line up 
with a single, quick, sudden bob at frequent intervals. 
The spring is the time to catch the big Nepigon 
jack-fish, or pike. They haunt the grassy places in 
little bogs and coves, and are caught by trolling. A 
jack-fish is what we call a pike, and John Watt, the 
famous guide in that country, tells of those fish of 
such size that when a man of ordinary height held 
the tail of one up to his shoulder, the head of the 
fish dragged on the ground. He must be responsi- 
ble for the further assertion that he saw an Indian 
squaw drag a net, with meshes seven inches square, 
and catch two jack-fish, each of which weighed more 
than fifty pounds when cleaned. The story another 
local historian told of a surveyor who caught a big 
jack-fish that felt like a sunken log, and could only 
be dragged until its head came to the surface, when 
he shot it and it broke away — that narrative I will 



BIG FISHING 123 

leave for the next New Yorker who goes to Nepigon. 
And yet it seems to me that such stories distinguish 
a fishing resort quite as much as the fish actually 
cauo^ht there. Men would not dare to romance like 
that at many places I have fished in, where the trout 
are scheduled and numbered, and where you have 
got to go to a certain rock on a fixed day of the 
month to catch one. 

The Indians are very clever at spearing the jack- 
fish. At niglit they use a bark torch, and slaughter 
the big fish with comparative ease ; but their great 
skill with the spear is shown in the daytime, when 
the pike are sunning themselves in the grass and 
weeds along-shore. But when I made my trip up 
the river, I saw them usins: so man\' nets as to 
threaten the early reduction of the stream to the 
plane of the ordinary resort. The water was so 
clear that we could paddle beside the nets and see 
each one's catch — here a half-dozen suckers, there a 
jack-fish, and next a couple of beautiful trout. Find- 
ing a squaw attending to her net, we bought a trout 
from her before we had cast a line. The habit of 
buying fish under such circumstances becomes sec- 
ond nature to a New Yorker, We are a peculiar 
people. Our fishermen are modest away from the 
city, but at home they assume the confident tone 
which comes of knowing the way to Fulton fish- 
market. 

The Nepigon River is a trout's paradise, it is so 
full of rapids and saults. It is not at all a folly to 
fish there with a fly-rod. There are records of very 
large trout at the Hudson Bay post; but you may 



124 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

actually catch four -pound trout yourself, and what 
you catch yourself seems to me better than any one's 
else records. I have spoken of the Nepigon River 
as a roadway. It is one of the great trading trails to 
and from the far North. At the mouth of the river, 
opposite the Hudson Bay post, you will see a wreck 
of one of its noblest vehicles — an old York boat, such 
as carry the furs and the supplies to and fro. I 
fancy that Wolseley used precisely such boats to 
float his men to where he wanted them in 1S70. 
Farther along, before you reach the first portage, you 
will be apt to see several of the sloops used by the 
natives for the Lake Superior fishing. They are dis- 
tinguished for their ugliness, capacity, and strength; 
but the last two qualities are what they are built to 
obtain. Of course the prettiest vehicles are the 
canoes. As the bark and the labor are easily ob- 
tainable, these picturesque vessels are very numer- 
ous ; but a change is coming over their shape, and 
the historic Ojibaway canoe, in which Hiawatha is 
supposed to have sailed into eternity, will soon be a 
thing found only in pictures. 

There is good sport with the rod wherever you 
please to go in " the bush," or wilderness, north of 
the Canadian Pacific Railway, in Ontario and the 
western part of Quebec. My first venture in fishing 
through the ice in that region was part of a hunting 
experience, when the conditions were such that hunt- 
ing was out of the question, and our party feasted 
upon salt pork, tea, and tomatoes during day after day. 
At first, fried salt pork, taken three times a day in a 
hunter's camp, seems not to deserve the harsh things 



BIG FISHING 125 

that have been said and written about it. The open- 
air life, the constant and tremendous exercise of 
hunting or chopping wood for the fire, the novel sur- 
roundings in the forest or the camp, all tend to make 
a man say as hearty a grace over salt pork as he 
ever did at home before a holiday dinner. Where we 
were, up the Ottawa in the Canadian wilderness, the 
pork was all fat, like whale blubber. At night the 
cook used to tilt up a pan of it, and put some twisted 
ravellings of a towel in it, and light one end, and 
thus produce a lamp that would have turned Alfred 
the Great green with envy, besides smoking his 
palace till it looked as venerable as Westminster 
Abbey does now. I ate my share seasoned with the 
comments of Mr. Frederic Remington, the artist, 
who asserted that he was never without it on his 
hunting trips, that it was pure carbonaceous food, 
that it fastened itself to one's ribs like a true friend, 
and that no man could freeze to death in the same 
country with this astonishing provender. We had 
canned tomatoes and baker's bread and plenty of tea, 
with salt pork as \\'\^ pi'ece de 7'esistance 2i\. every meal. 
I know now — though I would not have confessed it 
at the time — that mixed with my admiration of salt 
pork was a growing dread that in time, if no change 
offered itself, I should tire of that diet. I began to 
feel it sticking to me more like an Old Man of the 
Sea than a brother. The woodland atmosphere be- 
gan to taste of it. When I came in-doors it seemed 
to me that the log shanty was gradually turning into 
fried salt pork. I could not say that I knew how it 
felt to eat a quail a day for thirty days. One man 



126 ON Canada's frontier 

cannot know everything. But I felt that I was 
learning. 

One day the cook put his hat on, and took his axe, 
and started out of the slianty door with an unwonted 
air of business. 

" Been goin' fish," said he, in broken Indian. " Good 
job if get trout." 

A good job ? Why, the thought was like a float- 
ing spar to a sailor overboard ! I went with him. 
It was a cold day, but I was dressed in Canadian 
style — the style of a country where every one puts 
on everything he owns : all his stockings at once, all 
his flannel shirts and drawers, all his coats on top of 
one another, and when there is nothing else left, 
draws over it all a blanket suit, a pair of moccasins, a 
tuque, and whatever pairs of gloves he happens to be 
able to find or borrow. One gets a queer feeling 
with so many clothes on. They seem to separate 
you from yourself, and the person you feel inside 
your clothing might easily be mistaken for another 
individual. But you are warm, and that's the main 
thing. 

I rolled along the trail behind the Indian, through 
the deathly stillness of the snow-choked forest, and 
presently, from a knoll and through an opening, we 
saw a great woodland lake. As it lay beneath its 
unspotted quilt of snow, edged all around with bal- 
sam, and pine and other evergreens, it looked as 
though some mighty hand had squeezed a colossal 
tube of white paint into a tremendous emerald bowl. 
Never had I seen nature so perfectly unalloyed, so 
exquisitely pure and peaceful, so irresistibly beauti- 



BIG FISHING 



129 



ful. I think I should have hesitated to print my 
ham-Hke moccasin upon that virgin sheet had I been 
the guide, but " Brossy," the cook, stalked ahead, mak- 
ing the powdery flakes fly before and behind him, 
and I followed. Our tracks were white, and quickly 
faded from view behind us; and, moreover, we passed 
the siarns of a fox and a deer that had crossed durino: 
the night, so that our profanation of the scene was 
neither serious nor exclusive. 

The Indian walked to an island near the farther 
shore, and using his axe with the light, easy freedom 
that a white man sometimes attains with a penknife, 
he cut two short sticks for fish-poles. He cut six 
yards of fish- line in two in the middle of the piece, 
and tied one end of each part to one end of each 
stick, making rude knots, as if any sort of a fastening 
would do. Equally clumsily he tied a bass hook to 
each fish-line, and on each hook he speared a little 
cube of pork fat which had gathered an envelope of 
granulated smoking- tobacco while at rest in his 
pocket. Next, he cut two holes in the ice, which was 
a foot thick, and over these we stood, sticks in hand, 
with the lines dangling through the holes. Hardly 
had I lowered my line (which had a bullet flattened 
around it for a sinker, by-the-way) when I felt it jerked 
to one side, and I pulled up a three-pound trout. It 
was a speckled trout. This surprised me, for I had no 
idea of catching anything but lake or gray trout in 
that water. I caught a gray trout next — a smaller 
one than the first — and in another minute I had 
landed another three-pound speckled beauty. I\Iy 
pork bait was still intact, and it may be of interest to 

9 



130 ON CANADA'S FRONTIER 

fishermen to know that the original cubes of pork 
remained on those two hooks a week, and caught us 
many a mess of trout. 

There came a lull, which gave us time to philoso- 
phize on the contrast between this sort of fishing 
and the fashionable sport of using the most costly 
and delicate rods — like pieces of jewelry — and of cal- 
culating to a nicety what sort of flies to use in match- 
inor the chano^ins: weather or the varvinor tastes of 
trout in waters where even all these calculations and 
provisions would not yield a hatful of small fish in a 
day. Here I was, armed like an urchin beside a 
minnow brook, and catching bigger trout than I ever 
saw outside Fulton Market — trout of the choicest 
variety. But while I moralized my Indian grew im- 
patient, and cut himself a new hole out over deep 
water. He caught a couple of two-and-a-half-pound 
brook trout and a four-pound gray trout, and I was 
as well rewarded. But he was still discontented, and 
moved to a strait opening into a little bay, where he 
cut two more holes. " Eas' wind," said he, " fish no 
bite." 

I found on that occasion that no quantity of cloth- 
ing will keep a man warm in that a-lmost arctic cli- 
mate. First my hands became cold, and then my 
feet, and then my ears. A thin film of ice closed up 
the fishing holes if the water was not constantly dis- 
turbed. The thermometer must have registered ten 
or fifteen degrees below zero. Our lines became 
quadrupled in thickness at the lower ends by the ice 
that formed upon them. When they coiled for an 
instant upon the ice at the edge of a hole, they stuck 



BIG FISHING 



131 



to it, frozen fast. By stamping my feet and putting 
my free hand in my pocket as fast as I shifted my 
pole from one hand to the other, I managed to per- 
sist in fishing. I noticed many interesting things as 
I stood there, almost alone in that almost pathless 
wilderness. First I saw that the Indian was not 
cold, though not half so warmly dressed as I. The 
circulation or vitality of those scions of nature must 
be very remarkable, for no sort of weather seemed 
to trouble them at all. Wet feet, wet bodies, intense 
cold, whatever came, found and left them indifferent. 
Night after night, in camp, in the open air, or in our 
log shanty, we white men trembled with the cold when 
the log fire burned low, but the Indians never woke 
to rebuild it. Indeed, I did not see one have his 
blanket pulled over his chest at any time. Wood- 
cocks were drumming in the forest now and then, 
and the shrill, bird-like chatter of the squirrels fre- 
quently rang out upon the forest quiet. My Indian 
knew every noise, no matter how faint, yet never 
raised his head to listen. " Dat squirrel," he would 
say, when I asked him. Or, " Woodcock, him call- 
ing rain," he ventured. Once I asked what a very 
queer, distant, muffled sound was. " You hear dat 
when you walk. Keep still, no hear dat," he said. 
It was the noise the ice made when I moved. 

As I stood there a squirrel came down upon a log 
jutting out over the edge of the lake, and looked me 
over. A white weasel ran about in the bushes so 
close to me that I could have hit him with a peanut 
shell. That morning some partridge had been seen 
feeding in the bush close to members of our party. 



132 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

It was a country where small game is not hunted, 
and does not always hide at man's approach. We 
had left our fish lying on the ice near the various 
holes from which we pulled them, and I thought of 
them when a flock of ravens passed overhead, crying 
out in their hoarse tones. They were sure to see 
the fish dotting the snow like raisins in a bowl of 
rice. 

" Won't they steal the fish.?" I asked. 

" T'ink not," said the Indian. 

" I don't know anything about ravens," I said, " but 
if they are even distantly related to a crow, they will 
steal whatever they can lift." 

We could not see our fish around the bend of the 
lake, so the Indian dropped his rod and walked stolid- 
ly after the birds. As soon as he passed out of sight 
I heard him scolding the great birds as if they were 
unruly children. 

" 'Way, there !" he cried — " 'way ! Leave dat fish, 
you. What you do dere, you t'ief .f^" 

It was an outcropping of the French blood in his 
veins that made it possible for him to do such vio- 
lence to Indian reticence. The birds had seen our 
fish, and were about to seize them. Only the fool- 
ish bird tradition that renders it necessary for every- 
thing with wings to circle precisely so many times 
over its prey before taking it saved us our game and 
lost them their dinner. They had not completed 
half their quota of circles when Brossy began to yell 
at tJiem. When he returned his brain had awakened, 
and he began to remember that ravens were thieves. 
He said that the lumbermen in that country pack 



BIG FISHING ,o. 

their dinners in canvas sacks and hide them in the 
snow. Often the ravens come, and, searching out 
this food, tear off the sacks and steal their contents. 
I bade good-bye to pork three times a day after that. 
At least twice a day we feasted upon trout. 



VT 

"A SKIN FOR A SKIn" 

The motto of the Hudson Bay Fur-trading Company 

THOSE who go to the newer parts of Canada to- 
day will find that several of those places which 
their school geographies displayed as Hudson Bay 
posts a few years ago are now towns and cities. In 
them they will find the trading stations of old now 
transformed into general stores. Alongside of the Ca- 
nadian headquarters of the great corporation, where 
used to stand the walls of Fort Garry, they will see 
the principal store of the city of Winnipeg, an institu- 
tion worthy of any city, and more nearly to be likened 
to Whiteley's Necessary Store in London than to any 
shopping-place in New York. As in Whiteley's you 
may buy a house, or anything belonging in or around 
a house, so you may in this great Manitoban estab- 
lishment. The great retail emporium of Victoria, 
the capital of British Columbia, is the Hudson Bay 
store ; and in Calgary, the metropolis of Alberta and 
the Canadian plains, the principal shopping-place in 
a territory beside which Texas dwindles to the pro- 
portions of a park is the Hudson Bay store. 

These and many other shops indicate a new de- 
velopment ot the business of the last of England's 
great chartered monopolies; but instead of marking 
the manner in which civilization has forced it to aban- 



A SKIN FOR A SKIN 



135 



don its original function, this merely demonstrates 
that the proprietors have taken advantage of new 
conditions while still pursuing their original trade. It 
is true that the huge corporation is becoming a great 
retail shop-keeping company. It is also true that by 
the surrender of its monopolistic privileges it got a 
consolation prize of money and of twenty millions of 
dollars' worth of land, so that its chief business may 
yet become that of developing and selling real estate. 
But to-day it is still, as it was two centuries ago, the 
greatest of fur-trading corporations, and fur-trading 
is to-day a principal source of its profits. 

Reminders of their old associations as forts still 
confront the visitor to the modern city shops of the 
company. The great shop in Victoria, for instance, 
which, as a fort, was the hub around which grew the 
wheel that is now the capital of the province, has its 
fur trade conducted in a sort of barn-like annex of 
the bazaar; but there it is, nevertheless, and busy 
among the great heaps of furs are men who can re- 
member when the Hydahs and the T'linkets and the 
other neighboring tribes came down in their war ca- 
noes to trade their winter's catch of skins for guns 
and beads, vermilion, blankets, and the rest. Now 
this is the mere catch-all for the furs got at posts 
farther up the coast and in the interior. But up- 
stairs, above the store, where the fashionable ladies 
are looking over laces and purchasing perfumes, you 
will see a collection of queer old guns of a pattern 
familiar to Daniel Boone. They are relics of the fur 
company's stock of those famous "trade-guns" which 
disappeared long before they had cleared the plains 



136 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

of buffalo, and which the Indians used to deck with 
brass nails and bright paint, and value as no man to- 
day values a watch. But close to the trade-guns of 
romantic memory is something yet more highly sug- 
gestive of the company's former position. This is a 
heap of unclaimed trunks, " left," the employes will 
tell you, " by travellers, hunters, and explorers who 
never came back to inquire for them." 

It was not long ago that conditions existed such 
as in that region rendered the disappearance of a 
traveller more than a possibility. The wretched, 
squat, bow-legged, dirty laborers of that coast, who 
now dress as we do, and earn good wages in the sal- 
mon-fishing and canning industries, were not long 
ago very numerous, and still more villanous. They 
were not to be compared with the plains Indians as 
warriors or as men, but they were more treacherous, 
and wanting in high qualities. In the interior to-day 
are some Indians such as they were who are accused 
of cannibalism, and who have necessitated warlike 
defences at distant trading- posts. Travellers who 
escaped Indian treachery risked starvation, and stood 
their chances of losing their reckoning, of freezing to 
death, of encounters with grizzlies, of snow-slides, of 
canoe accidents in rapids, and of all the other casual- 
ties of life in a territory which to-day is not half ex- 
plored. Those are not the trunks of Hudson Bay 
men, for such would have been sent home to Eng- 
lish and Scottish mourners ; they are the luggage of 
chance men who happened along, and outfitted at 
the old post before going farther. But the compa- 
ny's men were there before them, had penetrated the 










,U 



'<*. ./ 



"A SKIN FOR A SKIN " 139 

region farther and earlier, and there they are to-day, 
carrying on the fur trade under conditions strongly 
resembling those their predecessors once encoun- 
tered at posts that are now towns in farming regions, 
and where now the locomotive and the steamer are 
familiar vehicles. Moreover, the status of the com- 
pany in British Columbia is its status all the way 
across the North from the Pacific to the Atlantic. 

To me the most interesting and picturesque life to 
be found in North America, at least north of Mexico, 
is that which is occasioned by this principal phase of 
the company's operations. In and around the fur 
trade is found the most notable relic of the white 
man's earliest life on this continent. Our wild life 
in this country is, happily, gone. The frontiersman 
is more difficult to find than the frontier, the cowboy 
has become a laborer almost like any other, our Ind- 
ians are as the animals in our parks, and there is 
little of our country that is not threaded by railroads 
or wagon-ways. But in new or western Canada this 
is not so. A vast extent of it north of the Canadian 
Pacific Railway, which hugs our border, has been ex- 
plored only as to its waterways, its valleys, or its open 
plains, and where it has been traversed much of it 
remains as Nature and her near of kin, the red men, 
had it of old. On the streams canoes are the vehi- 
cles of travel and of commerce ; in the forests "trails" 
lead from trading-post to trading- post, the people 
are Indians, half-breeds, and Esquimaux, who live by 
hunting and fishing as their forebears did ; the Hud- 
son Bay posts are the seats of white population; the 
post factors are the magistrates. 



140 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

All this is changing with a rapidity which history 
will liken to the sliding of scenes before the lens of 
a magic-lantern. Miners are crushing the foot-hills 
on either side of the Rocky Mountains, farmers and 
cattle-men have advanced far northward on the prai- 
rie and on the plains in narrow lines, and railroads 
are pushing hither and thither. Soon the limits of 
the inhospitable zone this side of the Arctic Sea, 
and of the marshy, weakly-wooded country on either 
side of Hudson Bay will circumscribe the fur-trader's 
field, except in so far as there may remain equally 
permanent hunting-grounds in Labrador and in the 
mountains of British Columbia. Therefore now, when 
the Hudson Bay Company is laying the foundations 
of widely different interests, is the time for halting 
the old original view that stood in the stereopticon 
for centuries, that we may see what it revealed, and 
will still show far longer than it takes for us to 
view it. 

The Hudson Bay Company's agents were not the 
first hunters and fur-traders in British America, an- 
cient as was their foundation. The French, from 
the Canadas, preceded them no one knows how 
many years, though it is said that it was as early as 
1627 that Louis XHI. chartered a company of the 
same sort and for the same aims as the Eno-lish com- 
pany. Whatever came of that corporation I do not 
know, but by the time the Englishmen established 
themselves on Hudson Bay, individual Frenchmen 
and half-breeds had penetrated the country still far- 
ther west. They were of hardy, adventurous stock, 
and they loved the free roving life of the trapper and 



"a skin for a skin 141 

hunter. Fitted out by the merchants of Canada, 
they would pursue the waterways which there cut up 
the wilderness in every direction, their canoes laden 
with goods to tempt the savages, and their guns or 
traps forming part of their burden. They would be 
gone the greater part of a year, and always returned 
with a store of furs to be converted into money, 
which was, in turn, dissipated in the cities with devil- 
may-care jollity. These were the coureicrs du dots, 
and theirs was the stock from which came the voy- 
ageurs of the next era, and the half-breeds, who joined 
the service of the rival fur companies, and who, by- 
the-way, reddened the history of the North-west ter- 
ritories with the little bloodshed that mars it. 

Charles II. of England was made to believe that 
wonders in the way of discovery and trade would 
result from a grant of the Hudson Bay territory 
to certain friends and petitioners. An experimental 
voyage was made with good results in 1668, and in 
1670 the King granted the charter to what he styled 
" the Governor and Company of Adventurers of 
England trading into Hudson's Bay, one body cor- 
porate and politique, in deed and in name, really and 
fully forever, for Us, Our heirs, and Successors." It 
was indeed a royal and a wholesale charter, for the 
King declared, " We have given, granted, and con- 
firmed unto said Governor and Company sole trade 
and commerce of those Seas, Streights, Bays, Rivers, 
Lakes, Creeks, and Sounds, in whatsoever latitude they 
shall be, that lie within the entrance of the Streights 
commonly called Hudson's, together with all the 
Lands, Countries, and Territories upon the coasts 



142 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

and confines of the Seas, etc., . . . not already actually 
possessed by or granted to any of our subjects, or pos- 
sessed by the subjects of any other Christian Prince 
or State, with the fishing of all sorts of Fish, Whales, 
Sturgeons, and all other Royal Fishes, .... together 
with the Royalty of the Sea upon the Coasts within 
the limits aforesaid, and all Mines Royal, as w'ell dis- 
covered as not discovered, of Gold, Silver, Gems, and 
Precious Stones, .... and that the said lands be 
henceforth reckoned and reputed as one of Our 
Plantations or Colonies in America called Rupert's 
Land." For this gift of an empire the corporation 
was to pay yearly to the king, his heirs and succes- 
sors, two elks and two black beavers whenever and as 
often as he, his heirs, or his successors " shall hap- 
pen to enter into the said countries." The company 
was empowered to man ships of war, to create an 
armed force for security and defence, to make peace 
or war with any people that were not Christians, and 
to seize any British or other subject who traded in 
their territory. The King named his cousin. Prince 
Rupert, Duke of Cumberland, to be first governor, 
and it was in his honor that the new territory got its 
name of Rupert's Land. 

In the company were the Duke of Albemarle, 
Earl Craven, Lords Arlington and Ashley, and sev- 
eral knights and baronets. Sir Philip Carteret among 
them. There were also five esquires, or gentlemen, 
and John Portman, " citizen and goldsmith." They 
adopted the witty sentence, ''Pro pelle cukin'" {A 
skin for a skin), as their motto, and established as 
their coat of arms a fox sejant as the crest, and a 




THE BEAR TRAP 



shield showing four beavers in the quarters, and the 
cross of St. George, the whole upheld by two stags. 

The " adventurers " quickly established forts on the 
shores of Hudson Bay, and began trading with the 
Indians, with such success that it was rumored they 
made from twenty-five to fifty per cent, profit every 
year. But they exhibited all of that timidity which 
capital is ever said to possess. They were nothing 
like as enterprising as the French coureurs die bois. 
In a hundred years they were no deeper in the 



144 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

country than at first, excepting as they extended 
their httle system of forts or " factories " up and down 
and on either side of Hudson and James bays. In 
view of their profits, pei'haps this lack of enterprise 
is not to be wondered at. On the other hand, their 
charter was given as a reward for the efforts they 
had made, and were to make, to find " the Northwest 
passage to the Southern seas." In this quest they 
made less of a trial than in the getting of furs ; how 
much less we shall see. But the company had no 
lack of brave and hardy followers. At first many 
of the men at the factories were from the Orkney 
Islands, and those islands remained until recent times 
the recruiting- source for this service. This was be- 
cause the Orkney men were inured to a rigorous cli- 
mate, and to a diet largely composed of fish. They 
were subject to less of a change in the company's serv- 
ice than must have been endured by men from almost 
any part of England. 

I am going, later, to ask the reader to visit Rupert's 
Land when the company had shaken off its timidity, 
overcome its obstacles, and dotted all British Amer- 
ica with its posts and forts. Then we shall see the 
interiors of the forts, view the strange yet not always 
hard or uncouth life of the company's factors and 
clerks,- and glance along the trails and watercourses, 
mainly unchanged to-day, to note the work and sur- 
roundings of the Indians, the voyageurs, and the rest 
who inhabit that region. But, fortunately, I can first 
show, at least roughly, much that is interesting about 
the company's growth and methods a century and a 
half ago. The information is gotten from some 



"a skin for a skin 145 

English Parliamentary paptM's forming a report of a 
committee of the House of Commons in 1749. 

Arthur Dobbs and others petitioned Parliament 
to give them either the rights of the Hudson Bay 
Company or a similar charter. It seems that Eng- 
land had offered ^20,000 reward to whosoever should 
find the bothersome passage to the Southern seas 
via this northern route, and that these petitioners had 
sent out two ships for that purpose. They said that 
when others had done no more than this in Charles 
n.'s time, that monarch had given them " the greatest 
privileges as lords proprietors " of the Hudson Bay 
territory, and that those recipients of royal favor 
were bounden to attempt the discovery of the de- 
sired passage. Instead of this, they not only failed 
to search effectually or in earnest for the passage, 
but they had rather endeavored to conceal the same, 
and to obstruct the discovery thereof by others. 
They had not possessed or occupied any of the lands 
granted to them, or extended their trade, or made any 
plantations or settlements, or permitted other British 
subjects to plant, settle, or trade there. They had 
established only four factories and one small trading- 
house ; yet they had connived at or allowed the 
French to encroach, settle, and trade within their 
limits, to the great detriment and loss of Great 
Britain. The petitioners argued that the Hudson 
Bay charter was monopolistic, and therefore \'oid, 
and at any rate it had been forfeited " by non-user or 
abuser." . 

In the course of the hearing upon both sides, the 
" voyages upon discovery," according to the com- 



146 ON Canada's frontier 

pany's own showing, were not undertaken until the 
corporation had been in existence nearly fifty years, 
and then the search had only been prosecuted during 
eighteen years, and with only ten expeditions. Two 
ships sent out from England never reached the bay, 
but those which succeeded, and were then ready for 
adventurous cruising, made exploratory voyages that 
lasted only between one month and ten weeks, so 
that, as we are accustomed to judge such expeditions, 
they seem farcical and mere pretences. Yet their 
largest ship was only of 190 tons burden, and the 
others were a third smaller — vessels like our small 
coasting schooners. The most particular instruc- 
tions to the captains were to trade with all natives, 
and persuade them to kill whales, sea-horses, and 
seals ; and, subordinately and incidentally, " by God's 
permission,'^ to find out the Strait of Annian, a fanci- 
ful sheet of water, with tales of which that irresponsi- 
ble Greek sea-tramp, Juan de Fuca, had disturbed all 
Christendom, saying that it led between a great isl- 
and in the Pacific (Vancouver) and the mainland 
into the inland lakes. To the factors at their forts 
the company sent such lukewarm messages as, " and 
if you can by any means find out any discovery or 
matter to the northward or elsewhere in the com- 
pany's interest or advantage, do not fail to let us 
know every year." 

The attitude of the company towards discovery 
suggests a Dogberry at its head, bidding his serv- 
ants to "comprehend" the North-west passage, but 
should they fail, to thank God they were rid of a 
villain. In truth, they were traders pure and simple. 



"a skin for a skin " 



147 



and were making great profits with little trouble and 
expense. 

They brought from England about ^"4000 worth 
of powder, shot, guns, fire-steels, flints, gun-worms, 
powder-horns, pistols, hatchets, sword blades, awl 
blades, ice- chisels, files, kettles, fish-hooks, net -lines, 
burning-glasses, looking-glasses, tobacco, brandy, gog- 
gles, gloves, hats, lace, needles, thread, thimbles, 
breeches, vermilion, worsted sashes, blankets, flannels, 
red feathers, buttons, beads, and " shirts, shoes, and 
stockens." They spent, in keeping up their posts 







HUSKIE DOGS riGHTIN'G 



148 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

and ships, about ^15,000, and in return they brought 
to England castorum, whale-fins, whale-oil, deer-horns, 
goose-quills, bed-feathers, and skins — in all of a value 
of about ^26,000 per annum. I have taken the 
average for several years in that period of the com- 
pany's history, and it is in our money as if they spent 
^90,000 and got back $130,000, and this is their own 
showins: under such circumstances as to make it the 
course of wisdom not to boast of their profits. They 
had three times trebled their stock and otherwise in- 
creased it, so that having been 10,500 shares at the 
outset, it was now 103,950 shares. 

And now that we have seen how natural it was 
that they should not then bother with exploration 
and discovery, in view of the remuneration that came 
for simply sitting in their forts and buying furs, let 
me pause to repeat what one of their wisest men said 
casually, between the whiffs of a meditative cigar, last 
summer: "The search for the north pole must soon 
be taken up in earnest," said he. " Man has paused 
in the undertaking because other fields where his 
needs were more pressing, and where effort was more 
certain to be rewarded with success, had been neg- 
lected. This is no longer the fact, and geographers 
and other students of the subject all agree that the 
north pole must next be sought and found. Speak- 
ing only on ni}^ own account and from my knowl- 
edge, I assert that whenever any government is in 
earnest in this desire, it will employ the men of this 
fur service, and they will find the pole. The com- 
pany has posts far within the arctic circle, and they 
are manned by men peculiarly and exactly fitted for 



A SKIN FOR A SKIN 



149 



the adventure. They are hardy, acutely intelligent, 
self-reliant, accustomed to the climate, and all that it 
engenders and demands. They are on the spot 
ready to start at the earliest moment in the season, 
and they have with them all that they will need on 
the expedition. They would do nothing hurriedly 
or rashly ; they would know what they were about as 
no other white men would — and they would get 
there." 

I mention this not merely for the novelty of the 
suggestion and the interest it may excite, but because 
it contributes to the reader's understandinof of the 

O 

scope and character of the work of the company. It 
is not merely Western and among Indians, it is hy- 
perborean and among Esquimaux. But would it not 
be passing strange if, beyond all that England has 
gained from the careless gift of an empire to a few 
favorites by Charles II,, she should yet possess the 
honor and glory of a grand discovery due to the nat- 
ural results of that action ? 

To return to the Parliamentary inquiry into the 
company's affairs 140 years ago. If it served no 
other purpose, it drew for us of this day an outline 
picture of the first forts and their inmates and cus- 
toms. Being printed in the form our language took 
in that day, when a gun was a " musquet " and a 
stockade was a " palisadoe," we fancy we can see the 
bumptious governors — as they then called the fac- 
tors or agents — swelling about in knee-breeches 
and cocked hats and colored waistcoats, and relying, 
through their fear of the savages, upon the little 
putty-pipe cannon that they speak of as " swivels." 



150 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

These were ostentatiously planted before their quar- 
ters, and in front of these again were massive double 
doors, such as we still make of steel for our bank 
safes, but, when made of wood, use only for our re- 
frigerators. The views we get of the company's 
" servants " — which is to say, mechanics and laborers 
— are all of trembling varlets, and the testimony is 
full of hints of petty sharp practice towards the red 
man, suggestive of the artful ways of our own Hol- 
landers, who bought beaver-skins by the weight of 
their feet, and then pressed down upon the scales 
with all their might. 

The witnesses had mainly been at one time in the 
employ of the company, and they made the point 
against it that it imported all its bread (/. c, grain) 
from England, and neither encouraged planting nor 
cultivated the soil for itself. But there were several 
who said that even in August they found the soil 
still frozen at a depth of two and a half or three feet. 
Not a man in the service was allowed to trade with 
the natives outside the forts, or even to speak with 
them. One fellow was put in irons for going into 
an Indian's tent ; and there was a witness who had 
" heard a Governor say he would whip a Man with- 
out Tryal ; and that the severest Punishment is a 
Dozen of Lashes." Of course there was no instruct- 
ing the savages in either English or the Christian 
religion ; and we read that, though there were twenty- 
eight Europeans in one factory, " witness never heard 
Sermon or Prayers there, nor ever heard of any such 
Thing either before his Time or since." Hunters 
who offered their services got one-half what they 



"A SKIN FOR A SKIN 



153 



shot or trapped, and the captains of vessels kept in 
the bay were allowed "25 /. per ccnt!^ for all the 
whalebone they got. 

One witness said : " The method of trade is by a 
standard set by the Governors. They never lower 
it, but often double it, so that where the Standard 
directs i Skin to be taken they generally take Two." 
Another said he " had been ordered to shorten the 
measure for Powder, which ought to be a Pound, and 
that within these 10 Years had been reduced an 
Ounce or Two." " The Indians made a Noise some- 
times, and the Company gave them their Furs again." 
A book-keeper lately in the service said that the com- 
pany's measures for powder were short, and yet even 
such measures were not filled above half full. Profits 
thus made were distinguished as "the overplus trade," 
and signified what skins were got more than were 
paid for, but he could not say whether such gains 
went to the company or to the governor. (As a 
matter of fact, the factors or governors shared in the 
company's profits, and were interested in swelling 
them in every way they could.) 

There was much news of how the French traders 
got the small furs of martens, foxes, and cats, by in- 
tercepting the Indians, and leaving them to carry 
only the coarse furs to the company's forts. A wit- 
ness "had seen the Indians come down in fine French 
cloaths, with as much Lace as he ever saw upon any 
Cloaths whatsoever. He believed if the Company 
would give as much for the Furs as the French, the 
Indians would bring them down ;" but the French 
asked only thirty marten -skins for a gun, whereas 



154 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

the company's standard was from thirty-six to forty 
such skins. Then, again, the company's plan (un- 
changed to-day) was to take the Indian's furs, and 
then, being possessed of them, to begin the barter. 

This shouldering the common grief upon the 
French was not merely the result of the chronic 
English antipathy to their ancient and their lively 
foes. The French were swarming all around the 
outer limits of the company's field, taking first choice 
of the furs, and even beginning to set up posts of 
their own. Canada was French soil, and peopled by 
as hardy and adventurous a class as inhabited any 
part of America. The coureurs du bois and the bois- 
irules (half-breeds), whose success afterwards led to 
the formation of rival companies, had begun a mos- 
quito warfare, by canoeing the waters that led to 
Hudson Bay, and had penetrated looo miles farther 
west than the English. One Thomas Barnett, a 
smith, said that the French intercepted the Indians, 
forcing them to trade, " when they take what they 
please, giving them Toys in Exchange ; and fright 
them into Compliance by Tricks of Sleight of Hand; 
from whence the Indians conclude them to be Con- 
jurers; and if the French did not compel the Indians 
to trade, they would certainly bring all the Goods to 
the Englishr 

This must have seemed to the direct, practical 
English trading mind a wretched business, and wor- 
thy only of Johnny Crapeau, to worst the noble Brit- 
on by monkeyish acts 6f conjuring. It stirred the 
soul of one witness, who said that the way to meet it 
was " by sending some English with a little Brandy." 



"A SKIN FOR A SKIN ' 1 55 

A gallon to certain cliicfs and a c^allon and a half 
to others would certainly induce the natives to come 
down and trade, he thought. 

But while the testimony of the English was valu- 
able as far as it went, which was mainly concerning 
trade, it was as nothing regarding the life of the na- 
tives compared with that of one Joseph La France, 
of Missili-Mackinack (Mackinaw), a traveller, hunter, 
and trader. He had been sent as a child to Quebec 
to learn French, and in later years had been from 
Lake Nipissing to Lake Champlain and the Great 
Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ouinipigue 
(Winnipeg) or Red River, and to Hudson Bay. He 
told his tales to Arthur Dobbs, who made a book of 
them, and part of that became an appendix to the 
committee s report. La France said : 

"That the high price on Eu7-opea7i Goods discourages the Natives 
so much, that if it were not that they are under a Necessity of hav- 
ing Guns, Powder, Shot, Hatchets, and other Iron Tools for their 
Hunting, and Tobacco, Brandy, and some Paint for Luxury, they 
would not go down to the Factory with what they now carry. They 
leave great numbers of Furs and Skins behind them. A good Hunt- 
er among the Indians can kill 600 Beavers in a season, and carry 
down but 100" (because their canoes were small); " the rest he uses 
at home, or hangs them upon Branches of Trees upon the Death of 
their Children, as an Offering to them ; or use them for Bedding and 
Coverings : they sometimes burn off the Fur, and roast the Beavers, 
like Pigs, upon any Entertainments ; and they often let them rot, 
having no further Use of them. The Beavers, he says, are of Three 
Colours — the Brown-reddish Colour, the Black, and the White. The 
Black is most valued by the Company, and in E/ii^land ; the White, 
though most valued in Canada, is blown upon by the Company's 
Factors at the Bay, they not allowing so much for these as for the 
others ; and therefore the Indians use them at home, or burn off the 
Hair, when they roast the Beavers, like Pigs, at an Entertainment 
when they feast together. The Beavers are delicious Food, but the 



156 ON Canada's frontier 

Tongue and Tail the most delicious Parts of the whole. They mul- 
tiply very fast, and if they can pmpty a Pond, and take the whole 
Lodge, they generally leave a Pair to breed, so that they are fully 
stocked again in Two or Three Years. The American Oxen, or 
Beeves, he says, have a large Bunch upon their backs, which is by 
far the most delicious Part of them for Food, it being all as sweet as 
Marrow, juicy and rich, and weighs several Pounds. 

" The Natives are so discouraged in their Trade with the Com- 
pany that no Peltry is worth the Carriage; and the finest Furs are 
sold for very little. They gave but a Pound of Gunpowder for 4 
Beavers, a Fathom of Tobacco for 7 Beavers, a Pound of Shot for i, 
an Ell of coarse Cloth for 15, a Blanket for 12, Two Fish-hooks or 
Three Flints for i ; a Gun for 25, a Pistol for 10, a common Hat with 
white Lace, 7; an Ax, 4; a Billhook, i ; a Gallon of Brandy, 4; a 
chequer'd Shirt, 7 ; all of which are sold at a monstrous Profit, even 
to 2000 per Cent. Notwithstanding this discouragement, he com- 
puted that there were brought to the Factory in 1742, in all, 50,000 
Beavers and above 9000 Martens. 

" The smaller Game, got by Traps or Snares, are generally the 
Employment of the Women and Children ; such as the Martens, 
Squirrels, Cats, Ermines, &c. The Elks, Stags, Rein - Deer, Bears, 
Tygers, wild Beeves, Wolves, Foxes, Beavers, Otters, Corcajeu, &c., 
are the employment of the Men. The Indiaiis, when they kill any 
Game for Food, leave it where they kill it, and send their wives next 
Day to carry it home. They go home in a direct Line, never miss- 
ing their way, by observations they make of the Course they take 
upon their going out. The Trees all bend towards the South, and 
the Branches on that Side are larger and stronger than on the North 
Side ; as also the Moss upon the Trees. To let their Wives know 
how to come at the killed Game, they from Place to Place break ofif 
Branches and lay them in the Road, pointing them the Way they 
should go, and sometimes Moss ; so that they never miss finding it. 

" In Winter, when they go abroad, which they must do in all 
Weathers, before they dress, they rub themselves all over with Bears 
Greaze or Oil of Beavers, which does not freeze ; and also rub all the 
Fur of their Beaver Coats, and then put them on ; they have also a 
kind of Boots or Stockings of Beaver's Skin, well oiled, with the 
Fur inwards ; and above them they have an oiled Skin laced about 
their Feet, which keeps out the Cold, and also Water ; and by this 
means they never freeze, nor suffer anything by Cold. In Summer, 
also, when they go naked, they rub themselves with these Oils or 
Grease, and expose themselves to the Sun without being scorched. 



"A SKIN FOR A SKIN 1 57 

their Skins always being kept soft and supple by it; nor do any 
Flies, Bugs, or Musketoes, or any noxious Insect, ever molest them. 
When they want to get rid of it, they go into the Water, and rub 
themselves all over with Mud or Clay, and let it dry upon them, and 
then rub it off; but whenever they are free from the Oil, the Flies 
and Musketoes immediately attack them, and oblige them again to 
anoint themselves. They are much afraid of the wild Humble Bee, 
they going naked in Summer, that they avoid them as much as they 
can. They use no Milk from the time they are weaned, and they all 
hate to taste Cheese, having taken up an Opinion that it is made of 
Dead Mens Fat. They love Prunes and Raisins, and will give a 
Beaver-skin for Twelve of them, to carry to their Children ; and also 
for a Trump or Jew's Harp. The Women have all fine Voices, but 
have never heard any Musical Instrument. They are very fond of all 
Kinds of Pictures or Prints, giving a Beaver for the least Print ; and 
all Toys are like Jewels to them." 

He reported that " the Indians west of Hudson's 
Bay Kve an erratic Life, and can have no Benefit by 
tame Fowl or Cattle. They seldom stay above a 
Fortnight in a Place, unless they find Plenty of 
Game. After having built their Hut, they disperse 
to get Game for their Food, and meet again at Night 
after having killed enough to maintain them for that 
Day. When they find Scarcity of Game, they remove 
a League or Two farther; and thus they traverse 
through woody Countries and Bogs, scarce missing 
One Day, Winter or Summer, fair or foul, in the 
greatest Storms of Snow." 

It has been often said that the great Peace River, 
which rises in British Columbia and flows through 
a pass in the Rocky Mountains into the northern 
plains, was named "the Unchaga," or Peace, "be- 
cause "(to quote Captain W. F". Butler) "of the stub- 
born resistance offered by the all-conquering Crees, 
which induced that warlike tribe to make peace on 



158 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

the banks of the river, and leave at rest the beaver- 
hunters " — that is, the Beaver tribe — upon the river's 
banks. There is a sentence in La France s story 
that intimates a more probable and lasting reason 
for the name. He says that some Indians in the 
southern centre of Canada sent frequently to the 
Indians alonor some river near the mountains " with 
presents, to confirm the peace with them." The 
story is shadowy, of course, and yet La France, in 
the same narrative, gave other information which 
proved to be correct, and none which proved ridicu- 
lous. We know that there were "all-conquering" 
Crees, but there were also inferior ones called the 
Swampies, and there were others of only intermediate 
valor. As for the Beavers, Captain Butler himself 
offers other proof of their mettle besides their " stub- 
born resistance." He says that on one occasion a 
young Beaver chief shot the dog of another brave in 
the Beaver camp. A hundred bows were instantly 
drawn, and ere night eighty of the best men of the 
tribe lay dead. There was a parley, and it was re- 
solved that the chief who slew the dog should leave 
the tribe, and take his friends with him. A century 
later a Beaver Indian, travelling with a white man, 
heard his own tongue spoken by men among the 
Blackfeet near our border. They were the Sarcis, 
descendants of the exiled band of Beavers. They 
had become the most reckless and valorous members 
of the warlike Blackfeet confederacy. 

La France said that the nations who " go up the 
river " with presents, to confirm the peace with cer- 
tain Indians, were three months in going, and that 




COUREUR DU BOIS 



the Indians in question live beyond a range of 
mountains beyond the Assiniboins (a plains tribe). 
Then he goes on to say that still farther beyond those 
Indians " are nations who have not the use of fire- 
arms, by which many of them are made slaves and 
sold " — to the Assiniboins and others. These are 
plainly the Pacific coast Indians. And even so long 
ago as that (about 1 740), half a century before Mac- 



i6o ON Canada's frontier 

kenzie and Vancouver ;net on the Pacific coast, La 
France had told the story of an Indian who had gone 
at the head of a band of thirty braves and their fam- 
ihes to make war on the Flatheads " on the Western 
Ocean of America." They were from autumn until 
the next April in making the journey, and they "saw 
many Black Fish spouting up in the sea." It was a 
case of what the Irish call " spoiling for a fight," for 
they had to journey 1500 miles to meet "enemies" 
whom they never had seen, and who were peaceful, 
and inhabited more or less permanent villages. The 
plainsmen got more than they sought. They attacked 
a village, were outnumbered, and lost half their force, 
besides having several of their men wounded. On 
the way back all except the m.an who told the story 
died of fatiorue and famine. 

The journeys which Indians made in their wildest 
period were tremendous. Far up in the wilderness 
of British America there are legends of visits by the 
Iroquois. The Blackfeet believe that their progen- 
itors roamed as far south as Mexico for horses, and 
the Crees of the plains evinced a correct knov/ledge 
of the country that lay beyond the Rocky Mountains 
in their conversations with the first whites who traded 
with them. Yet those white men, the founders of an 
organized fur trade, clunq- to the scene of their first 
operations for more than one hundred years, while 
the bravest of their more enterprising rivals in the 
Northwest Company only reached the Pacific, with 
the aid of eight Iroquois braves, 120 years after the 
English king chartered the senior company ! The 
French were the true Yankees of that country. 



"a skin for a skin i6r 

They and their half-breeds were always in the van as 
explorers and traders, and as early as 1731 M. Va- 
rennes de la Verandrye, licensed by the Canadian 
Government as a trader, penetrated the West as far 
as the Rockies, leading Sir Alexander Mackenzie to 
that extent by more than sixty years. 

But to return to the first serious trouble the Hud- 
son Bay Company met. The investigation of its 
affairs by Parliament produced nothing more than 
the picture I have presented. The committee re- 
ported that if the original charter bred a monopoly, 
it would not help matters to give the same privileges 
to others. As the questioned legality of the charter 
was not competently adjudicated upon, they would 
not allow another company to invade the premises of 
the older one. 

At this time the great company still hugged the 
shores of the bay, fearing the Indians, the half-breeds, 
and the French. Their posts were only six in all, 
and were mainly fortified with palisaded enclosures, 
with howitzers and swivels, and with men trained to 
the use of guns. Moose Fort and the East Main 
factory were on either side of James Bay, Forts Al- 
bany, York, and Prince of Wales followed up the 
west coast, and Henley was the southernmost and 
most inland of all, being on Moose River, a tributary 
of James Bay. The French at first traded beyond 
the field of Hudson Bay operations, and their castles 
were their canoes. But when their great profits and 
familiarity with the trade tempted the thrifty French 
capitalists and enterprising Scotch merchants of 
Montreal into the formation of the rv^jfil Northwest 



i62 ON Canada's frontier 

Trading Company in 1783, fixed trading-posts be- 
gan to be established all over the Prince Rupert's 
Land, and even beyond the Rocky Mountains in 
British Columbia. By 18 18 there were about forty 
Northwest posts as against about two dozen Hudson 
Bay factories. The new company not only disputed 
but ignored the chartered rights of the old company, 
holding that the charter had not been sanctioned by 
Parliament, and was in every way unconstitutional as 
creative of a monopoly. Their French partners and 
engages shared this feeling, especially as the French 
crown had been first in the field with a royal charter. 
Growing bolder and bolder, the Northwest Company 
resolved to drive the Hudson Bay Company to a 
legal test of their rights, and so in 1803-4 they es- 
tablished a Northwest fort under the eyes of the old 
company on the shores of Hudson Bay, and fitted 
out ships to trade with the natives in the strait. But 
the Englishmen did not accept the challenge; for the 
truth was they had their own doubts of the strength 
of their charter. 

They pursued a different and for them an equally 
bold course. That hard-headed old nobleman the 
fifth Earl of Selkirk came uppermost in the company 
as the engineer of a plan of colonization. There was 
plenty of land, and some wholesale evictions of High- 
landers in Sutherlandshire, Scotland, had rendered a 
great force of hardy men homeless. Selkirk saw in 
this situation a chance to play a long but certainly 
triumphant game with his rivals. His plan was to 
plant a colony which should produce grain and 
horses and men for the old company, saving the im- 



"a skin for a skin" 165 

portation of all three, and building up not only a 
nursery for men to match the coureurs du bois, but a 
stronghold and a seat of a future government in the 
Hudson Bay interest. Thus was ushered in a new 
and important era in Canadian history. It was the 
opening of that part of Canada; by a loop-hole rather 
than a door, to be sure. 

Lord Selkirk's was a practical soul. On one occa- 
sion in animadverting against the Northwest Com- 
pany he spoke of them contemptuously as fur-traders, 
yet he was the chief of all fur-traders, and had been 
known to barter with an Indian himself at one of the 
forts for a fur. He held up the opposition to the 
scorn of the world as profiting upon the weakness of 
the Indians by giving them alcohol, yet he ordered 
distilleries set up in his colony afterwards, saying, 
" We grant the trade is iniquitous, but if we don't 
carry it on others will ; so we may as well put the 
guineas in our own pockets." But he was the man 
of the moment, if not for it. His scheme of coloni- 
zation was born of desperation on one side and dis- 
tress on the other. It was pursued amid terrible 
hardship, and against incessant violence. It was 
consummated through bloodshed. The story is as 
interesting as it is important. The facts are ob- 
tained mainly from " Papers relating to the Red 
River Settlement, ordered to be printed by the 
House of Commons, July 12, 18 19." Lord Selkirk 
owned 40,000 of the ^105,000 (or shares) of the 
Hudson Bay Company; therefore, since 25,000 were 
held by women and children, he held half of all that 
carried votes. He got from the cpmpany a grant of 



1 66 ON Canada's frontier 

a large tract around what is now Winnipeg, to form 
an agricultural settlement for supplying the com- 
pany's posts with provisions. We have seen how 
little disposed its officers were to open the land to 
settlers, or to test its agricultural capacities. No one, 
therefore, will wonder that when this grant was made 
several members of the governing committee re- 
signed. But a queer development of the moment 
was a strong opposition from holders of Hudson Bay 
stock who were also owners in that company's great 
rival, the Northwest Company. Since the enemy 
persisted in prospering at the expense of the old 
company, the moneyed men of the senior corporation 
had taken stock of their rivals. These doubly inter- 
ested persons were also in London, so that the 
Northwest Company was no longer purely Canadian. 
The opponents within the Hudson Bay Company de- 
clared civilization to be at all times unfavorable to 
the fur trade, and the Northwest people argued that 
the colony would form a nursery for servants of the 
Bay Company, enabling them to oppose the North- 
west Company more effectually, as well as affording 
such facilities for new-comers as must destroy their 
own monopoly. The Northwest Company denied 
the legality of the charter rights of the Hudson Bay 
Company because Parliament had not confirmed 
Charles II.'s charter. 

The colonists came, and were met by Miles Mc- 
Donnell, an ex - captain of Canadian volunteers, as 
Lord Selkirk's agent. The immigrants landed on the 
shore of Hudson Bay, and passed a forlorn winter. 
They met some of. the Northwest Company's people 



"a skin for a skin 169 

under Alexander McDonnell, a cousin and brotlier-in- 
law to Miles McDonnell. Although Captain Miles 
read the grant to Selkirk in token of his sole right to 
the land, the settlers were hospitably received and 
well treated by the Northwest people. The settlers 
reached the place of colonization in August, 181 2. 
This place is what was known as Fort Garry until 
Winnipeg was built. It was at first called "the 
Forks of the Red River," because the Assiniboin 
there joined the Red. Lord Selkirk outlined his 
policy at the time in a letter in which he bade Miles 
McDonnell give the Northwest people solemn warn- 
ing that the lands were Hudson Bay property, and 
they must remove from them ; that they must not 
fish, and that if they did their nets were to be 
seized, their buildings were to be destroyed, and 
they were to be treated " as you would poachers in 
England." 

The trouble began at once. Miles accused Alex- 
ander of trying to inveigle colonists away from him. 
He trained his men in the use of guns, and uniformed 
a number of them. He forbade the exportation of 
any supplies from the country, and when some North- 
west men came to get baffalo meat they had hung 
on racks in the open air, according to the custom of 
the country, he sent armed men to send the others 
away. He intercepted a band of Northwest canoe- 
men, stationing men with guns and with two field- 
pieces on the river ; and he sent to a Northwest 
post lower down the river demanding the provisions 
stored there, which, when they were refused, were 
taken by force, the door being smashed in. For 



170 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

this a Hudson Bay clerk was arrested, and Captain 
Miles's men went to the rescue. Two armed forces 
met, but happily slaughter was averted. Miles Mc- 
Donnell justified his course on the ground that the 
colonists were distressed by need of food. It tran- 
spired at the time that one of his men while 
making cartridges for a cannon remarked that he 
was making them " for those Northwest ras- 
cals. They have run too long, and shall run no 
longer." After this Captain Miles ordered the stop- 
page of all buffalo -hunting on horseback, as the 
practice kept the buffalo at a distance, and drove 
them into the Sioux country, where the local Indians 
dared not go. 

But though Captain McDonnell was aggressive 
and vexatious, the Northwest Company's people, who 
had begun the mischief, even in London, were not 
now passive. They relied on setting the half-breeds 
and Indians against the colonists. They urged that 
the colonists had stolen Indian real estate in settling 
on the land, and that in time every Indian would starve 
as a consequence. At the forty-fifth annual meeting 
of the Northwest Company's officers, August, 1814^ 
Alexander McDonnell said, " Nothing but the com- 
plete downfall of the colony will satisfy some, by fair 
or foul means — a most desirable object, if it can be 
accomplished ; so here is at it with all my heart and 
energy." In October, 18 14, Captain McDonnell or- 
dered the Northwest Company to remove from the 
territory within six months. 

The Indians, first and last, were the friends of 
the colonists. They were befriended by the whites. 



"a skin for a skin 



171 



and in turn they 
cfave them suc- 
cor when famine 
fell upon them. 
Many of Cap- 
tain Miles Mc- 
Donnell's orders 
were in their in- 
terest, and they 
knew it. Ka- 
t a w a b e t a y, a 
chief, was tempt- 
ed with a big 
prize to destroy 
the settlement. 
He refused. On 
the opening of 
navigation in 
181 5 chiefs were 
bidden from the 
country around 
to visit the 
Northwest fac- 
tors, and were by 
them asked to 
destroy the col- 
ony. Not only 

did they decline, but they hastened to Captain Miles 
McDonnell to acquaint him with the plot. Duncan 
Cameron now appears foremost among the North- 
west Company's agents, being in charge of that com- 
pany's post on the Red River, in the Selkirk grant. 




THE INDIAN HUNTER OF 175O 



172 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

He told the chiefs that if they took the part of the 
colonists " their camp- fires should be totally extin- 
ofuished." When Cameron caus^ht one of his own 
servants doing a trifling service for Captain Miles 
McDonnell, he sent him upon a journey for which 
every engage of the Northwest Company bound him- 
self liable in joining the company; that was to make 
the trip to Mo ntreal, a voyage held in terrorem over 
€very servant of the corporation. More than that, 
he confiscated four horses and a wagon belonging 
to this man, and charged him on the company's books 
with the sum of 800 livres for an Indian squaw, whom 
the man had been told he was to have as his slave 
for a present. 

But though the Indians held aloof from the great 
and cruel conspiracy, the half-breeds readily joined 
in it. They treated Captain McDonnell's orders 
with contempt, and arrested one of the Hudson Bay 
men as a spy upon their hunting with horses. There 
lived along the Red River, near the colony, about 
thirty Canadians and seventy half-breeds, born of 
Indian squaws and the servants or officers of the 
Northwest Company. One -quarter of the number 
of " breeds " could read and write, and were fit to 
serve as clerks ; the rest were literally half savage, 
and were employed as hunters, canoe-men, " packers " 
(freighters), and guides. They were naturally inclined 
to side with the Northwest Company, and in time 
that corporation sowed dissension among the colo- 
nists themselves, picturing to them exaggerated dan- 
ger from the Indians, and offering them free pas- 
sage to Canada. They paid at least one of the lead- 




INDIAN HUNTER HANGING DEER OUT OF THE REACH OK WOLVES 



'A SKIN FOR A SKIN 



175 



ing colonists ^100 for furthering discontent in the 
settlement, and four deserters from the colony stole 
all the Hudson Bay field-pieces, iron swivels, and the 
howitzer. There was constant irritation and friction 
between the factions. In an affray far up at Isle-a-la- 
Crosse a man was killed on either side. Half-breeds 
came past the colony singing war-songs, and notices 
were posted around Fort Garry reading, "Peace with 
all the world except in Red River." The Northwest 
people demanded the surrender of Captain McDon- 
nell that he might be tried on their charges, and on 
June II, 1815, a band of men fired on the colonial 
buildings. The captain afterwards surrendered him- 
self, and the remnant of the colony, thirteen families, 
went to the head of Lake Winnipeg. The half, 
breeds burned the buildings, and divided the horses 
and effects. 

But in the autumn all came back with Colin Rob- 
ertson, of the Bay Company, and twenty clerks and 
servants. These were joined by Governor Robert 
Semple, who brought 160 settlers from Scotland. 
Semple was a man of consequence at home, a great 
traveller, and the author of a book on travels in 
Spain.* But he came in no conciliatory mood, and 
the foment was kept up. The Northwest Company 

* I am indebted to Mr. Matthew Semple, of Philadelphia, a grand- 
nephew of the murdered Governor, for further facts about that hero. 
He led a life of travel and adventure, spiced with almost romantic 
happenings. He wrote ten books: records of travel and one novel. 
His parents were passengers on an English vessel which was capt- 
ured by the Americans in 1776, and brought to Boston, Mass., where 
he was born on February 26, 1777. He was therefore only 39 years 
of age when he was slain. His portrait, now in Philadelphia, shows 
him to have been a man of striking and handsome appearance. 



176 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

tried to starve the colonists, and Governor Semple 
destroyed the enemy's 'fort below Fort Garry. Then 
came the end — a decisive battle and massacre. 

Sixty -five men on horses, and with some carts, 
were sent by Alexander McDonnell, of the North- 
west Company, up the river towards the colony. 
They were led by Cuthbert Grant, and included six 
Canadians, four Indians, and fifty -four half-breeds. 
It was afterwards said they went on innocent busi- 
ness, but every man was armed, and the " breeds " 
were naked, and painted all over to look like Ind- 
ians. They got their paint of the Northwest offi- 
cers. Moreover, there had been rumors that the col- 
onists were to be driven away, and that " the land 
was to be drenched with blood." It was on June 19, 
18 1 6, that runners notified the colony that the others 
were coming. Semple was at Fort Douglas, near 
Fort Garry. When apprised of the close approach 
of his assailants, the Governor seems not to have ap- 
preciated his danger, for he said, " We must go and 
meet those people ; let twenty men follow me." He 
put on his cocked hat and sash, his pistols, and shoul- 
dered his double-barrelled fowling-piece. The others 
carried a wretched lot of guns — some with the locks 
gone, and many that were useless. It was marshy 
ground, and they straggled on in loose order. They 
met an old soldier who had served in the army at 
home, and who said the enemy was very numerous, 
and that the Governor had better bring along his two 
field-pieces. 

" No, no," said the Governor ; " there is no occasion. 
I am only going to speak to them." 



'A SKIN FOR A SKIN 



177 



Nevertheless, after a moment's reflection, lie did 
send back for one of the great guns, saying it was 
well to have it in case of need. They halted a short 
time for the cannon, and then perceived the North- 
west party pressing towards them on their horses. 
By a common impulse the Governor and his follow- 
ers began a retreat, walking backwards, and at the 
same time spreading out a single line to present a 
longer front. The enemy continued to advance at a 
hand-gallop. From out among them rode a Cana- 
dian named Boucher, the rest formino; a half-moon 
behind him. Waving his hand in an insolent way 
to the Governor, Boucher called out, " What do you 
want .f*" 




MAKING THE SNOW-SHOE 



178 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

" What do jyou want?" said Governor Semple. 

" We want our forf," said Boucher, meaning the 
fort Semple had destroyed. 

" Go to your fort," said the Governor. 

"Why did you destroy our fort, you rascal?" Bou- 
cher demanded. 

" Scoundrel, do you tell me so ?" the Governor re- 
plied, and ordered the man's arrest. 

Some say he caught at Boucher's gun. But Bou- 
cher slipped off his horse, and on the instant a gun 
was fired, and a Hudson Bay clerk fell dead. An- 
other shot wounded Governor Semple, and he called 
to his followers, 

" Do what you can to take care of yourselves." 

Then there was a volley from the Northwest force, 
and with the clearing of the smoke it looked as 
though all the Governor's party were killed or wound- 
ed. Instead of taking care of themselves, they had 
rallied around their wounded leader. Captain Rog- 
ers, of the Governor's party, who had fallen, rose to 
his feet, and ran towards the enemy crying for mercy 
in English and broken French, when Thomas McKay, 
a "breed "and Northwest clerk, shot him through the 
head, another cutting his body open with a knife. 

Cuthbert Grant (who, it was charged, had shot 
Governor Semple) now went to the Governor, while 
the others despatched the wounded. 

Semple said, "Are you not Mr. Grant?" 

" Yes," said the other. 

" I am not mortally wounded," said the Governor, 
" and if you could get me conveyed to the fort, I 
think I should live." 



"a skin for a skin 179 

But when Grant left his side an Indian named 
Ma-chi-ca-taou shot him, some say through the breast, 
and some have it that he put a pistol to the Govern- 
or's head. Grant could not stop the savages. The 
bloodshed had crazed them. They slaughtered all 
the wounded, and, worse yet, they terribly maltreated 
the bodies. Twenty-two Hudson Bay men were killed, 
and one on the other side was wounded. 

There is a story that Alexander McDonnell shout- 
ed for joy when he heard the news of the massacre. 
One witness, who did not hear him shout, reports 
that he exclaimed to his friends : " Sacre noiu de 
Dieti! Bonnes nonvellcs ; vingt-detix Anglais hies f 

( ! Good news; twenty-two English slain!) It 

was afterwards alleged that the slaughter was ap- 
proved by every oflficer of the Northwest Company 
whose comments were recorded. 

It is a saying up in that country that twenty-six 
out of the sixty-five in the attacking party died vio- 
lent deaths. The record is only valuable as indicat- 
ing the nature and perils of the lives the hunters and 
half-breeds led. First, a Frenchman dropped dead 
while crossing the ice on the river, his son was 
stabbed by a comrade, his wife was shot, and his 
children were burned ; " Big Head," his brother, was 
shot by an Indian; Coutonohais dropped dead at a 
dance ; Battosh was mysteriously shot ; Lavigne was 
drowned ; Fraser was run through the body by a 
Frenchman in Paris; Baptiste Moralle, while drunk, 
was thrown into q, fire by inebriated companions and 
burned to death; another died drunk on a roadway; 
another was wounded by the bursting of his gun ; 



iSO ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

small-pox took the eleventh ; Duplicis was empaled 
upon a hay-fork, on which he jumped from a hay- 
stack; Parisien was shot, by a person unknown, in a 
buffalo-hunt; another lost his arm by carelessness; 
Gardapie, " the brave," was scalped and shot by the 
Sioux ; so was Vallee ; Ka-te-tee-goose was scalped 
and cut in pieces by the Gros-Ventres ; Pe-me-can- 
toss was thrown in a hole by his people ; and another 
Indian and his wife and children were killed by 
liglitning. Yet another was gored to death by a 
buffalo. The rest of the twenty-six died by being 
frozen, by drowning, by drunkenness, or by shameful 
disease. 

It is when things are at their worst that they be- 
gin to mend, says a silly old proverb; but when his- 
tory is studied these desperate situations often seem 
part of the mending, not of themselves, but of the 
broken cause of progress. There was a little halt 
here in Canada, as we shall see, but the seed of settle- 
ment had been planted, and thenceforth continued to 
grow. Lord Selkirk came with all speed, reaching 
Canada in 1817. It was now an English colony, 
and when he asked for a body-guard, the Government 
save him two sergeants and twelve soldiers of the 
Reoiment de Meuron. He made these the nucleus 
of a considerable force of Swiss and Germans who 
had formerly served in that regiment, and he pursued 
a triumphal progress to what he called his territory 
of Assiniboin, capturing all the Northwest Company's 
forts on the route, imprisoning the of^cers, and send- 
ing to jail in Canada all the accessaries to the mas- 
sacre, on charges of arson, murder, robbery, and " high 




A HUDSON BAY MAN (QUARTER-BREED) 



misdemeanors." Such was the prejudice against the 
Hudson Ba)' Company and the regard for the home 
corporation that nearly all were acquitted, and suits 
for very heavy damages were lodged against him. 

Selkirk sought to treat with the Indians for his 
land, which they said belonged to the Chippeways 
and the Crees. Five chiefs were found whose rio^ht 
to treat was acknowledged by all. On July iS, 1817, 
they deeded the territory to the King, " for the bene- 
fit of Lord Selkirk," giving him a strip two miles 
wide on either side of the Red River from Lake 



1 82 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

Winnipeg to Red Lake, north of the United States 
boundar3^ and along the' Assiniboin from Fort Garry 
to the Muskrat River, as well as within two circles 
of six miles radius around Fort Garry and Pembina, 
now in Dakota. Indians do not know what miles 
are; they measure distance by the movement of the 
sun while on a journey. They determined two miles 
in this case to be "as far as you can see daylight 
under a horses belly on the level prairie." On 
account of Selkirk's liberality they dubbed him " the 
silver chief." He agreed to give them for the land 
200 pounds of tobacco a year. He named his settle- 
ment Kildonan, after that place in Helmsdale, Suther- 
landshire, Scotland. He died in 182 1, and in 1836 
the Hudson Bay Company bought the land back 
from his heirs for ^84,000. The Swiss and Ger- 
mans of his regiment remained, and many retired 
servants of the company bought and settled there, 
forming the aristocracy of the place — a queer aris- 
tocracy to our minds, for many of the women were 
Indian squaws, and the children were " breeds." 

Through the perseverance and tact of the Right 
Hon. Edward Ellice, to whom the Government had 
appealed, all differences between the two great fur- 
trading companies were adjusted, and in 182 1 a 
coalition was formed. At Ellice's suggestion the 
giant combination then got from Parliament exclu- 
sive privileges beyond the waters that flow into 
Hudson Bay, over the Rocky Mountains and to the 
Pacific, for a term of twenty years. These extra 
privileges were surrendered in 1838, and were re- 
newed for twenty-one years longer, to be revoked, so 



"a skin for a skin 183 

far as British Columbia (then New Caledonia) was 
concerned, in 1858. That territory then became a 
crown colony, and it and Vancouver Island, which 
had taken on a colonial character at the time of the 
California gold fever (1849), were united in 1866. The 
extra privileges of the fur-traders were therefore not 
again renewed. In 1868, after the establishment of 
the Canadian union, whatever presumptive rights 
the Hudson Bay Company got under Charles II.'s 
charter were vacated in consideration of a payment 
by Canada of $1,500,000 cash, one- twentieth of all 
surveyed lands within the fertile belt, and 50,000 
acres surrounding the company's posts. It is es- 
timated that the land grant amounts to 7,000,000 
of acres, worth $20,000,000, exclusive of all town 
sites. 

Thus we reach the present condition of the com- 
pany, more than 220 years old, maintaining 200 cen- 
tral posts and unnumbered dependent ones, and trad- 
ing in Labrador on the Atlantic; at Massett, on Queen 
Charlotte Island, in the Pacific ; and deep within the 
Arctic Circle in the north. The company was new- 
ly capitalized not long ago with 100,000 shares at 
^20 ($10,000,000), but, in addition to its dividends, it 
has paid back £'] in every ^20, reducing its capital 
to ^1,300,000. The stock, however, is quoted at its 
original value. The supreme control of the company 
is vested in a governor, deputy governor, and five 
directors, elected by the stockholders in London. 
They delegate their powers to an executive resident 
in this country, who was until lately called the " Gov- 
ernor of Rupert s Land," but now is styled the chief 



l84 ON CANADAS FRONTIER 

commissioner, and is in absolute charge of the com- 
pany and all its operations. His term of office is un- 
limited. The present head of the corporation, or 
governor, is Sir Donald A, Smith, one of the fore- 
most spirits in Canada, who worked his way up 
from a clerkship in the company. The business of 
the company is managed on the outfit system, the 
most old-fogyish, yet by its officers declared to be 
the most perfect, plan in use by any corporation. 
The method is to charge against each post all the 
supplies that are sent to it between June ist and 
June ist each year, and then to set against this the 
product of each post in furs and in cash received. It 
used to take seven years to arrive at the figures for a 
given year, but, owing to improved means of trans- 
portation, this is now done in two years. 

Almost wherever you go in the newly settled parts 
of the Hudson Bay territory you find at least one 
free-trader's shop set up in rivalry with the old com- 
pany's post. These are sometimes mere storehouses 
for the furs, and sometimes they look like, and are 
partly, general country stores. There can be no 
doubt that this rivalry is very detrimental to the fur 
trade from the stand-point of the future. The great 
company can afford to miss a dividend, and can lose 
at some points while gaining at others, but the free- 
traders must profit in every district. The conse- 
quence is such a reckless destruction of game that 
the plan adopted by us for our seal-fisheries — the 
leasehold system — is envied and advocated in Canada. 
A greater proportion of trapping and an utter un- 
concern for the destruction of the game at all ages 



"a skin for a skin 187 

are now ravaging the wilderness. Many districts 
return as many furs as they ever yielded, but the 
quantity is kept up at fearful cost by the extermina- 
tion of the game. On the other hand, the fortified 
wall of posts that opposed the development of Can- 
ada, and sent the surplus population of Europe to the 
United States, is rid of its palisades and field-pieces, 
and the main strongholds of the ancient company 
and its rivals have become cities. The old fort on 
Vancouver Island is now Victoria ; Fort Edmonton 
is the seat of law and commerce in the Peace River 
region ; old Fort William has seen Port Arthur rise 
by its side ; Fort Garry is Winnipeg ; Calgary, the 
chief city of Alberta, is on the site of another fort ; 
and Sault Ste. Marie was once a Northwest post. 

But civilization is still so far off from most of the 
*' factories," as the company's posts are called, that 
the day when they shall become cities is in no man's 
thought or ken. And the communication between 
the centres and outposts is, like the life of the traders, 
more nearly like what it was in the old, old days than 
most of my readers would imagine. My Indian 
guides were battling with their paddles against the 
mad current of the Nipigon, above Lake Superior, 
one day last summer, and I was only a few hours 
away from Factor Flanagan's post near the great 
lake, when we came to a portage, and might have 
imagined from what we saw that time had pushed the 
hands back on the dial of eternity at least a century. 

Some rapids in the river had to be avoided by the 
brigade that was being sent with supplies to a post 
far north at the head of Lake Nipigon. A cumbrous, 



l88 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

big-timbered little schooner, like a surf-boat with a 
sail, and a square-cut bateau had brought the men 
and goods to the " carry." The men were half-breeds 
as of old, and had brought along their women and 
children to inhabit a camp of smoky tents that we 
espied on a bluff close by ; a typical camp, with the 
blankets hung on the bushes, the slatternly women 
and half-naked children squatting or running about, 
and smudge fires smoking between the tents to drive 
off mosquitoes and flies. The men were in groups 
below on the trail, at the water-side end of which were 
the boats' cargoes of shingles and flour and bacon 
and shot and powder in kegs, wrapped, two at a time, 
in rawhide. They were dark-skinned, short, spare 
men, without a surplus pound of flesh in the crew, 
and with longish coarse black hair and straggling 
beards. Each man carried a tump-line, or long stout 
strap, which he tied in such a way around what he 
meant to carry that a broad part of the strap fitted 
over the crown of his head. Thus they " packed " 
the goods over the portage, their heads sustaining 
the loads, and their backs merely steadying them. 
When one had thrown his burden into place, he 
trotted off up the trail with springing feet, though 
the freight was packed so that lOO pounds should 
form a load. For bravado one carried 200 pounds, 
and then all the others tried to pack as much, and 
most succeeded. All agreed that one, the smallest 
and least muscular-looking one among them, could 
pack 400 pounds. 

As the men gathered around their " smudge " to 
talk with my party, it was seen that of all the parts 



"a skin for a skin 189 

of the picturesque costume of the voyageur or bois- 
brtile of old — the capote, the striped shirt, the pipe- 
tomahawk, plumed hat, gay leggins, belt, and mocca- 
sins — only the red worsted belt and the moccasins 
have been retained. These men could recall the 
day when they had tallow and corn meal for rations, 
got no tents, and were obliged to carry 200 pounds, 
lifting one package, and then throwing a second one 
atop of it without assistance. Now they carry only 
100 pounds at a time, and have tents and good food 
given to them. 

We will not follow them, nor meet, as they did, the 
York boat comins: down from the north with last 
winter's furs. Instead, I will endeavor to lift the cur- 
tain from before the great fur country beyond them, 
to give a glimpse of the habits and conditions that 
prevail throughout a majestic territory where the 
rivers and lakes are the only roads, and canoes and 
dog-sleds are the only vehicles. 



VII 

"TALKING MUSQUASH" 

Concluding the sketch of the history and work of the Hudson Bay Company 

THE most sensational bit of " musquash talk " 
in more than a quarter of a century among 
the Hudson Bay Company's employe's was started 
the other day, when Sir Donald A. Smith, the 
governor of the great trading company, sent a 
type -written letter to Winnipeg. If a Cree squaw 
had gone to the trading -shop at .Moose Factory 
and asked for a bustle and a box of face - powder 
in exchange for a beaver -skin, the suggestion of 
changing conditions in the fur trade would have 
been trifling compared with the sense of instability 
to which this appearance of machine- writing gave 
rise. The reader may imagine for himself what a 
wrench civilization would have gotten if the world 
had laid down its goose-quills and taken up the type- 
writer all in one day. And that is precisely what 
Sir Donald Smith had done. The quill that had 
served to convey the orders of Alexander Mackenzie 
had satisfied Sir George Simpson ; and, in our own 
time, while men like Lord Iddesleigh, Lord Kimber- 
ley, and Mr. Goschen sat around the candle-lighted 
table in the board-room of the company in London, 
quill pens were the only ones at hand. But Sir Don- 
ald's letter was not only the product of a machine; it 



"TALKING musquash" 19I 

contained instructions for the use of the type-writer in 
the ofifices at Winnipeg, and there was in the letter a 
protest against illegible manual chirography such as 
had been received from many factories in the wilder- 
ness. Talking business in the fur trade has always 
been called " talking musquash " (musk-rat), and after 
that letter came the turn taken by that form of talk 
suo-crested a oeneral fear that from the Arctic to our 
border and from Labrador to Queen Charlotte's Isl- 
ands the canvassers for competing machines will be 
" racing " in all the posts, each to prove that his in- 
strument can pound out more words in a minute 
than any other — in those posts where life has hitherto 
been taken so gently that when one day a factor 
heard that the battle of Waterloo had been foug^ht 
and won by the English, he deliberately loaded the 
best trade gun in the storehouse and went out and 
fired it into the pulseless woods, although it was two 
years after the battle, and the disquieted Old World 
had long known the greater news that Napoleon was 
caged in St. Helena. The only reassuring note in 
the "musquash talk" to-day is sounded when the 
subject of candles is reached. The Governor and 
committee in London still pursue their deliberations 
by candlelight. 

But rebellion against their fate is idle, and it is of 
no avail for the old factors to make the point that 
Sir Donald found no greater trouble in reading their 
writing than they encountered when one of his mis- 
sives had to be deciphered by them. The truth is 
that the tide of immigration which their ancient mo- 
nopoly first shunted into the United States is now 



192 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

sweeping over their vast territory, and altering more 
than its face. Not only are the factors aware that 
the new rule confining them to share in the profits 
of the fur trade leaves to the mere stockholders far 
greater returns from land sales and storekeeping, but 
a great many of them now find village life around 
their old forts, and railroads close at hand, and Law 
setting up its officers at their doors, so that in a 
great part of the territory the romance of the old 
life, and their authority as well, has fled. 

Less than four years ago I had passed by Ou'Ap 
pelle without visiting it, but last summer I resolved 
not to make the mistake again, for it was the last 
stockaded fort that could be studied without a tire- 
some and costly journey into the far north. It is on 
the Fishing Lakes, just beyond Manitoba. But on 
my way a Hudson Bay officer told me that they had 
just taken down the stockade in the spring, and that 
he did not know of a remaining " palisadoe " in all 
the company's system except one, which, curiously 
enough, had just been ordered to be put up around 
Fort Hazleton, on the Skeena River, in northern 
British Columbia, where some turbulent Indians 
have been very troublesome, and where whatever 
civilization there may be in Saturn seems nearer 
than our own. This one example of the survival of 
original conditions is far more eloquent of their en- 
durance than the thoughtless reader would imagine. 
It is true that there has come a tremendous change 
in the status and spirit of the company. It is true 
that its officers are but newly bending to external 
authority, and that settlers have poured into the 




TALKING MUSQUASH 



"TALKING musquash" I95 

south with such demands for food, clothes, tools, and 
weapons as to create within the old corporation one 
of the largest of shopkeeping companies. Yet to- 
day, as two centuries ago, the Hudson Bay Company 
remains the greatest fur -trading association that 
exists. 

The zone in which Fort Hazleton is situated 
reaches from ocean to ocean without suffering inva- 
sion by settlers, and far above it to the Arctic Sea is 
a grand belt wherein time has made no impress 
since the first factory was put up there. There and 
around it is a region, nearly two-thirds the size of 
the United States, which is as if our country were 
meagrely dotted with tiny villages at an average dis- 
tance of five days apart, with no other means of com- 
munication than canoe or dog train, and with not 
above a thousand white men in it, and not as many 
pure-blooded white women as you will find registered 
at a first-class New York hotel on an ordinary day. 
The company employs between fifteen hundred and 
two thousand white men, and I am assuming that 
half of them are in the fur country. 

We know that for nearly a century the company 
clung to the shores of Hudson Bay. It will be in- 
teresting to peep into one of its forts as they were at 
that time ; it will be amazing to see what a country 
that bay-shore territory was and is. There and over 
a vast territory three seasons come in four months — 
spring in June, summer in July and August, and au- 
tumn in September.- During the long winter the 
earth is blanketed deep in snow, and the water is 
locked beneath ice. Geese, ducks, and smaller birds 



196 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

abound as probably they are not seen elsewhere in 
America, but they either give place to or share the 
summer with mosquitoes, black-flies, and " bull-dogs " 
{tabanus) without number, rest, or mercy. For the 
land around Hudson Bay is a vast level marsh, so 
wet that York Fort was built on piles, with elevated 
platforms around the buildings for the men to walk 
upon. Infrequent bunches of small pines and a litter 
of stunted swamp -willows dot the level waste, the 
only considerable timber being found upon the banks 
of the rivers. There is a wide belt called the Arctic 
Barrens all along the north, but below that, at some 
distance west of the bay, the great forests of Canada 
bridge across the region north of the prairie and the 
plains, and cross the Rocky Mountains to reach the 
Pacific. In the far north the musk-ox descends al- 
most to meet the moose and deer, and on the near 
slope of the Rockies the wood-buffalo — larger, darker, 
and fiercer than the bison of the plains, but very like 
him — still roams as far south as where the buffalo 
ran highest in the days when he existed. 

Through all this northern country the cold in 
winter registers 40°, and even 50°, below zero, and 
the travel is by dogs and sleds. There men in camp 
may be said to dress to go to bed. They leave their 
winter's store of dried meat and frozen fish out-of- 
doors on racks all winter (and so they do down close 
to Lake Superior); they hear from civilization only 
twice a year at the utmost ; and when supplies have 
run out at the posts, w^e have heard of their boiling 
the parchment sheets they use instead of glass in 
their windows, and of their cooking the fat out of 



"talking musquash 197 

beaver-skins to keep from starving, though beaver is 
so precious that such recourse could only be had 
when the horses and dogs had been eaten. As to 
the value of the beaver, the reader who never has 
purchased any for his wife may judge what it must 
be by knowing that the company has long imported 
buckskin from Labrador to sell to the Chippeways 
around Lake Nipigon in order that they may not be 
tempted, as of old, to make thongs and moccasins of 
the beaver ; for their deer are poor, with skins full of 
worm-holes, whereas beaver leather is very tough and 
fine. 

But in spite of the severe cold winters, that are, in 
fact, common to all the fur territory, winter is the de- 
lightful season for the traders ; around the bay it is 
the only endurable season. The winged pests of 
which I have spoken are by no means confined to 
the tide-soaked region close to the great inland sea. 
The whole country is as wet as that orange of which 
geographers speak when they tell us that the water 
on the earth's surface is proportioned as if we were 
to rub a rough orange with a wet cloth. Up in 
what we used to call British America the illustra- 
tion is itself illustrated in the countless lakes of all 
sizes, the innumerable small streams, and the many 
great rivers that make waterways the roads, as canoes 
are the wagons, of the region. It is a vast paradise 
for mosquitoes, and I have been hunted out of fish- 
ing and hunting grounds by them as far south as the 
border. The " bull-dog " is a terror reserved for es- 
pecial districts. He is the Sioux of the insect world, 

as pretty as a warrior in buckskin and beads, but car- 
13* 



198 



ON CANADA S FRONTIER 



rying a red-hot sword blade, which, when sheathed in 
human flesh, will make the victim jump a foot from 
the ground, though there is no after-pain or itching 
or swelling from the thrust. 

Having seen the country, let us turn 
to the forts. Some of them really 
were forts, in so far as pali- 
sades and sentry towers 
and double doors and 
guns can make a 
fort, and one 
twenty 




INDIAN HUNTERS MOVING CAMP 



miles below 
Winnipeg was 
fort. It is still 
When the com- 
pany ruled the territory as 
its landlord, the defended 



a stone 
standinQ;. 



"tai.king musquash" 199 

posts were on the plains among the bad Indians, and 
on the Hudson Bay shore, where vessels of foreign 
nations might be expected. In the forests, on the 
lakes and rivers, the character and behavior of the 
fish-eatins: Indians did not warrant armament. The 
stockaded forts were nearly all alike. The stock- 
ade was of timber, of about such a height that a 
man might look over it on tiptoe. It had towers at 
the corners, and York Fort had a great " lookout " 
tower within the enclosure. Within the barricade 
were the company's buildings, making altogether such 
a picture as New York presented when the Dutch 
founded it and called it New Amsterdam, except 
that we had a church and a stadt-house in our en- 
closure. The Hudson Ba}^ buildings were some- 
times arranged in a hollow square, and sometimes in 
the shape of a letter H, with the factor's house con- 
necting the two other parts of the character. The 
factor's house was the best dwelling, but there were 
many smaller ones for the laborers, mechanics, hunt- 
ers, and other non-commissioned men. A long, low, 
whitewashed log -house was apt to be the clerks' 
house, and other large buildings were the stores 
where merchandise was kept, the fur -houses where 
the furs, skins, and pelts were stored, and the Indian 
trading-house, in which all the bartering was done. 
A powder-house, ice-house, oil-house, and either a 
stable or a boat-house for canoes completed the post. 
All the houses had double doors and windows, and 
wherever the men lived there was a tremendous 
stove set up to battle with the cold. 

The abode of jollity was the clerks' house, or bach- 



200 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

elors' quarters. Each man had a little bedroom con- 
taining his chest, a chair, and a bed, with the walls 
covered with pictures cut from illustrated papers or 
not, according to each man's taste. The big room 
or hall, where all met in the long nights and on off 
days, was as bare as a baldpate so far as its white- 
washed or timbered walls went, but the table in the 
middle was littered with pipes, tobacco, papers, books, 
and pens and ink, and all around stood (or rested on 
hooks overhead) guns, foils, and fishing-rods. On 
Wednesdays and Saturdays there was no work in at 
least one big factory. Breakfast was served at nine 
o'clock, dinner at one o'clock, and tea at six o'clock. 
The food varied in different places. All over the 
prairie and plains great stores of pemmican were 
kept, and men grew to like it very much, though it 
was nothing but dried buffalo beef pounded and 
mixed with melted fat. But where they had pemmi- 
can they also enjoyed buffalo hunch in the season, 
and that was the greatest delicacy, except moose muf- 
fle (the nose of the moose), in all the territory. In 
the woods and lake country there were venison and 
moose as well as beaver— which is very good eating 
— and many sorts of birds, but in that region dried 
fish (salmon in the west, and lake trout or white-fish 
nearer the bay) was the staple. The young fellows 
hunted and fished and smoked and drank and lis- 
tened to the songs of the voyageurs and the yarns of 
the " breeds " and Indians. For the rest there was 
plenty of work to do. 

They had a costume of their own, and, indeed, in 
that respect there has been a sad change, for all the 




SETTING A MINK-TRAP 



people, white, red, and crossed, dressed picturesquely. 
You could always distinguish a Hudson Bay man by 
his capote of light blue cloth with brass buttons. In 
winter they wore as much as a Quebec carter. They 
wore leather coats lined with flannel, edged with fur, 
and double-breasted. A scarlet worsted belt went 
around their waists, their breeches were of smoked 
buckskin, reaching down to three pairs of blanket 
socks and moose moccasins, with blue cloth leggins 
up to the knee. Their buckskin mittens were hung 
from their necks by a cord, and usually they wrapped 
a shawl of Scotch plaid around their necks and 
shoulders, while on each one's head was a fur cap 
with ear-pieces. 



202 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

The French Canadians and " breeds," who were 
the voyagem's and hunters, made a gay appearance. 
They used to wear the company's regulation hght 
blue capotes, or coats, m winter, with flannel shirts, 
either red or blue, and corduroy trousers gartered at 
the knee with bead - work. They all wore gaudy 
worsted belts, long, heavy woollen stockings — cov- 
ered with gayly- fringed leggins — fancy moccasins, 
and tuques, or feather -decked hats or caps bound 
with tinsel bands. In mild weather their costume 
was formed of a blue striped cotton shirt, corduroys, 
blue cloth leggins bound with orange ribbons, the in- 
evitable sash or worsted belt, and moccasins. Every 
hunter carried a powder-horn slung from his neck, 
and in his belt a tomahawk, which often served also 
as a pipe. As late as 1862, Viscount Milton and 
W. B. Cheadle describe them in a book, The North- 
west Passage by Land, in the following graphic lan- 



" The men appeared in gaudy array, with beaded fire-bag, gay 
sash, blue or scarlet leggings, girt below the knee with beaded gar- 
ters, and moccasins elaborately embroidered. The (half-breed) wom- 
en were in short, bright-colored skirts, showing richly embroidered 
leggings and white moccasins of cariboo -skin beautifully worked 
with flowery patterns in beads, silk, and moose hair." 

The trading-room at an open post was — and is 
now — like a cross-roads store, having its shelves 
laden with every imaginable article that Indians 
like and hunters need — clothes, blankets, files, scalp- 
knives, gun screws, flints, twine, fire-steels, awls, beads, 
needles, scissors, knives, pins, kitchen ware, guns, 
powder, and shot. An Indian who came in with 



"talking musquash 203 

furs threw them down, and when they were counted 
received the right number of castors — Httle pieces of 
wood which served as money — with which, after the 
hours of reflection an Indian spends at such a time, 
he bousfht what he wanted. 

But there was a wide difference between such a 
trading-room and one in the plains country, or where 
there were dangerous Indians — such as some of the 
Crees, and the Chippeways, Blackfeet, Bloods, Sarcis, 
Sioux, Sicanies, Stonies, and others. In such places 
the Indians were let in only one or two at a time, 
the soods were hidden so as not to excite their cu- 
pidity, and through a square hole grated with a cross 
of iron, whose spaces were only large enough to pass 
a blanket, what they wanted was given to them. 
That is all done away with now, except it be in 
northern British Columbia, where the Indians have 
been turbulent. 

Farther on we shall perhaps see a band of Indians 
on their way to trade at a post. Their custom is to 
wait until the first signs of spring, and then to pack 
up their winter's store of furs, and take advantage of 
the last of the snow and ice for the journey. They 
hunt from November to May; but the trapping and 
shooting of bears go on until the 15th of June, for 
those animals do not come from their winter dens 
until May begins. They come to the posts in their 
best attire, and in the old days that formed as strong 
a contrast to their present dress as their leather 
tepees of old did to the cotton ones of to-day. Bal- 
lantyne, who wrote a book about his service with the 
great fur company, says merely that they were paint- 



204 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

ed, and with scalp-locks fringing their clothes; but in 
Lewis and Clarke's journal we read description after 
description of the brave costuming of these color-and- 
ornament- loving people. Take the Sioux, for in- 
stance. Their heads were shaved of all but a tuft 
of hair, and feathers hung from that. Instead of 
the universal blanket of to-day, their main garment 
was a robe of buffalo-skin with the fur left on, and 
the inner surface dressed white, painted gaudily with 
figures of beasts and queer designs, and fringed with 
porcupine quills. They wore the fur side out only 
in wet weather. Beneath the robe they wore a shirt 
of dressed skin, and under that a leather belt, under 
which the ends of a breech-clout of cloth, blanket 
stuff, or skin were tucked. They wore leggins of 
dressed antelope hide with scalp -locks fringing the 
seams, and prettily beaded moccasins for their feet. 
They had necklaces of the teeth or claws of wild 
beasts, and each carried a fire- bag, a quiver, and a 
brightly painted shield, giving up the quiver and 
shield when guns came into use. 

The Indians who came to trade were admitted to 
the store precisely as voters are to the polls under 
■the Australian system — one by one. They had to 
leave their guns outside. When rum was given out, 
each Indian had to surrender his knife before he got 
his tin cup. 

The company made great use of the Iroquois, and 
considered them the best boatmen in Canada. Sir 
Alexander Mackenzie, of the Northwest Company, 
employed eight of them to paddle him to the Pacific 
Ocean by way of the Peace and Fraser rivers, and 



"talking musquash" 207 

when the greatest of Hudson Bay executives, Sir 
George Simpson, travelled, Iroquois always propelled 
him. The company had a uniform for all its Indian 
employes — a blue, gray, or blanket capote, very loose, 
and reaching below the knee, with a red worsted belt 
around the waist, a cotton shirt, no trousers, but art- 
fully beaded leggins with wide flaps at the seams, 
and moccasins over blanket socks. In winter they 
wore buckskin coats lined with flannel, and mittens 
were oriven to them. We have seen how the half- 
breeds were dressed. They were long employed at 
women's work in the forts, at making clothing and at 
mending. All the mittens, moccasins, fur caps, deer- 
skin coats, etc., were made by them. They were also 
the washer-women. 

Perhaps the factor had a good time in the old 
days, or thought he did. He had a wife and serv- 
ants and babies, and when a visitor came, which was 
not as often as snow-drifts blew over the stockade, 
he entertained like a lord. At first the factors used 
to send to London, to the head office, for a wife, to 
be added to the annual consignment of goods, and 
there must have been a few who sent to the Orkneys 
for the sweethearts they left there. But in time the 
rule came to be that they married Indian squaws. 
In doing this, not even the first among them acted 
blindly, for their old rivals and subsequent com- 
panions of the Northwest and X. Y. companies be- 
gan the custom, and the French voyageurs and coti- 
reurs du dots had mated with Indian women before 
there was a Hudson Bay Company. These rough 
and hardy woodsmen, and a large number of half- 



208 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

breeds born of just such alliances, began at an early- 
day to settle near the trading-posts. Sometimes they 
established what might be called villages, but were 
really close imitations "of Indian camps, composed of 
a cluster of skin tepees, racks of fish or meat, and a 
swarm of dogs, women, and children. In each tepee 
was the fireplace, beneath the flue formed by the 
open top of the habitation, and around it were the 
beds of brush, covered with soft hides, the inevitable 
copper kettle, the babies swaddled in blankets or 
moss bags, the women and dogs, the gun and paddle, 
and the junks and strips of raw meat hanging over- 
head in the smoke. This has not changed to-day ; 
indeed, very little that I shall speak of has altered in 
the true or far fur country. The camps exist yet. 
They are not so clean (or, rather, they are more 
dirty), and the clothes and food are poorer and harder 
to get ; that is all. 

The Europeans saw that these women were docile, 
or were kept in order easily by floggings with the 
tent poles ; that they were faithful and industrious, as 
a rule, and that they were not all unprepossessing 
— from their point of view, of course. Therefore it 
came to pass that these were the most frequent alli- 
ances in and out of the posts in all that country. 
The consequences of this custom were so peculiar 
and important that I must ask leave to pause and 
consider them. In Canada we see that the white 
man thus made his bow to the redskin as a brother 
in the truest sense. The old courctirs of Norman 
and Breton stock, loving a wild, free life, and in com- 
plete sympathy with the Indian, bought or took the 



TALKING MUSQUASH 



209 



"^^^"-^ 



squaws to wife, learned the 
Indian dialects, and shared 
their food and adventures 
with the tribes. As more 
and more entered the wil- 
derness, and at last came to 
be supported, in camps and 
at posts and as voyagctcrs, 
by the competing fur com- 
panies, there grew up a class 
of half - breeds who spoke 
English and French, mar- 
ried Indians, and were as 
much at home with the 
savages as with the whites. 
From this stock the Hudson 
Bay men have had a better 
choice of wives for more 
than a century. But when 
these " breeds " were turbu- 
lent and murderous — first in 
the attacks on Selkirk's col- 
ony, and next during the 
Riel rebellion — the Indians 
remained quiet. They de- 
fined their position when, in 
18 19, they were tempted 
with great bribes to massa- 
cre the Red River colonists. "No," said they; "the 
colonists are our friends." The men who sousrht to 
excite them to murder were the officers of the North- 
west Company, who bought furs of them, to be sure, 




VOYAGEUR OR CANOE -MAN OF 
GREAT SLAVE LAKE 



2IO ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

but the colonists had shared with the Indians in pov- 
erty and plenty, giving now and taking then. All 
were alike to the red men — friends, white men, and 
of the race that had taken so many of their women 
to wife. Therefore they went to the colonists to tell 
them what was being planned against them, and not 
from that day to this has an Indian band taken the 
war-path against the Canadians. I have read Gen- 
eral Custer's theory that the United States had to 
do with meat- eating Indians, whereas the Canadian 
tribes are largely fish-eaters, and I have seen 10,000 
references to the better Indian policy of Canada; but 
I can see no difference in the two policies, and be- 
tween the Rockies and the Great Lakes I find that 
Canada had the Stonies, Blackfeet, and many other 
fierce tribes of buffalo -hunters. It is in the slow, 
close -growing acquaintance between the two races, 
and in the just policy of the Hudson Bay men tow- 
ards the Indians, that I see the reason for Canada's 
enviable experience with her red men. 

But even the Hudson Bay men have had trouble 
with the Indians in recent years, and one serious 
affair orrew out of the relations between the com- 
pany's servants and the squaws. There is etiquette 
even among savages, and this was ignored up at old 
-Fort St. Johns, on the Peace River, with the result 
that the Indians slaughtered the people there and 
burned the fort. They were Sicanie Indians of that 
region, and after they had massacred the men in 
charge, they met a boat-load of white men coming up 
the river with goods. To them they turned their 
guns also, and only four escaped. It was up in that 



"talking musquash 213 

country likewise — just this side of the Rocky Mount- 
ains, where the plains begin to be forested — that a 
silly clerk in a post quarrelled with an Indian, and 
said to him, " Before you come back to this post 
again, your wife and child will be dead." He spoke 
hastily, and meant nothing, but squaw and pappoose 
happened to die that winter, and the Indian walked 
into the fort the next spring and shot the clerk with- 
out a word. 

To-day the posts are little village-like collections 
of buildings, usually showing white against a green 
background in the prettiest way imaginable; for, as 
a rule, they cluster on the lower bank of a river, or 
the lower near shore of a lake. There are not clerks 
€nouQ:h in most of them to render a clerks' house 
necessary, for at the little posts half-breeds are seen 
to do as good service as Europeans. As a rule, 
there is now a store or trading-house and a fur-house 
and the factor's house, the canoe -house and the 
stable, with a barn where gardening is done, as is 
often the case when soil and climate permit. Often 
the fur-house and store are combined, the furs being 
laid in the upper story over the shop. There is al- 
ways a flag-staff, of course. This and the flag, with 
the letters " H. B. C." on its field, led to the old hunt- 
ers' saying that the initials stood for " Here before 
Christ," because, no matter how far away from the 
frontier a man might go, in regions he fancied no 
white man had been, that flag and those letters stared 
him in the face. You will often find that the factor, 
rid of all the ancient timidity that called for " palisa- 
does and swivels," lives on the high upper bank above 



214 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

the store. The usual half-breed or Indian villa2:e is 
seldom farther than a couple of miles away, on the 
same water. The factor is still, as he always has 
been, responsible only to himself for the discipline 
and management of his post, and therefore among 
the factories we will find all sorts of homes — homes 
where a piano and the magazines are prized, and 
daughters educated abroad shed the lustre of refine- 
ment upon their surroundings, homes where no wom- 
an rules, and homes of the French half-breed type, 
which we shall see is a very different mould from 
that of the two sorts of British half-breed that are 
numerous. There never was a rule by which to 
gauge a post. In one you found religion valued and 
missionaries welcomed, while in others there never 
was sermon or hymn. In some, Hudson Bay rum 
met the rum of the free-traders, and in others no rum 
was bartered away. To-day, in this latter respect, 
the Dominion law prevails, and rum may not be 
given or sold to the red man. 

When one thinks of the lives of these factors, hid- 
den away in forest, mountain chain, or plain, or arctic 
barren, seeing the same very few faces year in and 
year out, with breaches of the monotonous routine 
once a year when the winter's furs are brought in, 
and once a year when the mail-packet arrives — when 
one thinks of their isolation, and lack of most of 
those influences which we in our walks prize the 
highest, the reason for their choosing that company's 
service seems almost mysterious. Yet they will tell 
you there is a fascination in it. This could be under- 
stood so far as the half-breeds and French Canadians 



"TALKING MUSQUASH 21 5 

were concerned, for they inherited the liking ; and, 
after all, though most of them are only laborers, no 
other laborers are so free, and none spice life with so 
much of adventure. But the factors are mainly men 
of ability and good origin, well fitted to occupy re- 
sponsible positions, and at better salaries. However, 
from the outset the rule has been that they have be- 
come as enamoured of the trader's life as soldiers and 
sailors always have of theirs. They have usually re- 
tired from it reluctantly, and some, having gone home 
to Europe, have begged leave to return. 

The company has always been managed upon 
something like a military basis. Perhaps the original 
necessity for forts and men trained to the use of arms 
suggested this. The uniforms were in keeping with 
the rest. The lowest rank in the service is that of 
the laborer, who may happen to fish or hunt at times, 
but is employed — or enlisted, as the fact is, for a 
term of years — to cut wood, shovel snow, act as a 
porter or gardener, and labor generally about the 
post. The interpreter was usually a promoted la- 
borer, but long ago the men in the trade, Indians 
and whites alike, met each other half-way in the mat- 
ter of language. The highest non-commissioned 
rank in early days was that of the postmaster at large 
posts. Men of that rank often got charge of small 
outposts, and we read that they were " on terms of 
equality with gentlemen." To-day the service has 
lost these fine points, and the laborers and commis- 
sioned officers are sharply separated. The so-called 
" gentleman " begins as a prentice clerk, and after a 
few years becomes a clerk. His next elevation is to 



2i6 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

the rank of a junior chief trader, and so on through 
the erades of chief trader, factor, and chief factor, to 
the office of chief commissioner, or resident American 
manager, chosen by" the London board, and having 
full powers delegated to him. A clerk — or " dark," 
as the rank is called — ma}' never touch a pen. He 
may be a trader. Then again he may be truly an 
accountant. With the rank he gets a commission, 
and that entitles him to a minimum guarantee, with 
a conditional extra income based on the profits of the 
fur trade. Men get promotions through the chief 
commissioner, and he has always made fitness, rather 
than seniority, the criterion. Retiring officers are 
salaried for a term of years, the original pension fund 
and system having been broken up. 

Sir Donald A. Smith, the present governor of the 
company, made his way to the highest post from the 
place of a prentice clerk. He came from Scotland 
as a youth, and after a time was so unfortunate as to 
be sent to the coast of Labrador, where a man is as 
much out of both the world and contact with the 
heart of the company as it is possible to be. The 
military system was felt in that instance; but every 
man who accepts a commission engages to hold him. 
self in readiness to go cheerfully to the north pole, or 
anywhere between Labrador and the Queen Char- 
lotte Islands. However, to a man of Sir Donald's 
parts no obstacle is more than a temporary impedi- 
ment. Though he stayed something like seventeen 
years in Labrador, he worked faithfully when there 
was work to do, and in his own time he read and 
studied voraciously. When the Riel rebellion — the 



" TALKING MUSQUASH 



217 




first one — disturbed 
the country's peace, 
he appeared on the 
scene as commissioner 
for the Government. 
Next he became chief 
commissioner for the 
Hudson Bay Com- 
pany. After a time he 
resisfned that office to 
00 on the board in 
London, and thence 
he stepped easily to 
the governorship. His 
parents, whose home 
was in Morayshire, 
Scotland, gave him at 
his birth, in 1S21, not 
only a constitution of 
iron, but that shrewd- 
ness which is only 

Scotch, and he afterwards developed remarkable fore- 
sight, and such a grasp of affairs and of complex sit- 
uations as to amaze his associates. 

Of course his career is almost as sins^ular as his 
gifts, and the governorship can scarcely be said to be 
the goal of the general ambition, for it has been most 
apt to go to a London man. Even ordinary promo- 
tion in the company is very slow, and it follows that 
most men live out their existence between the rank 
of clerk and that of chief factor. There are 200 cen- 
tral posts, and innumerable dependent posts, and the 



O 



[f.i"^'' 



pij^i'' 



.a:!' 



VOYAGEUR WITH TUMPLINE 



2l8 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

officers are continually travelling from one to an- 
other, some in their districts, and the chief or super- 
vising ones over vast reaches of country. In winter, 
when dogs and sleds are used, the men walk, as a 
rule, and it has been nothinq- for a man to trudge 
looo miles in that way on a winter's journey. Rod- 
erick Macfarlane, who was cut off from the world up 
in the Mackenzie district, became an indefatigable 
explorer, and made most of his journeys on snow- 
shoes. He explored the Peel, the Liard, and the 
Mackenzie, and their surrounding regions, and went 
far within the Arctic Circle, where he founded the 
most northerly post of the company. By the regular 
packet from Calgary, near our border, to the north- 
ernmost post is a 3000- mile journey. Macfarlane 
was fond of the study of ornithology, and classified 
and catalogued all the birds that reach the frozen 
regions. 

I heard of a factor far up on the east side of Hud- 
son Bay who reads his daily newspaper every morn- 
ing with his coffee — but of course such an instance is 
a rare one. He manages it by having a complete set 
of the London Times sent to him by each winter s 
packet, and each morning the paper of that date in 
the preceding year is taken from the bundle by his 
servant and dampened, as it had been when it left the 
press, and spread by the factor's plate. Thus he gets 
for half an hour each day a taste of his old habit and 
life at home. 

There was another factor who developed artistic 
capacity, and spent his leisure at drawing and paint- 
ing. He did so well that he ventured many sketches 



"TALKING musquash" 219 

for the illustrated papers of London, some of which 
were published. 

The half-breed has developed with the age and 
growth of Canada. There are now half-breeds and 
half-breeds, and some of them are titled, and others 
hold high official places. It occurred to an English 
lord not long ago, while he was being entertained in 
a Government house in one of the parts of newer 
Canada, to inquire of his host, " What are these half- 
breeds I hear about? I should like to see what one 
looks like." His host took the nobleman's breath 
away by his reply. " I am one," said he. There is 
no one w^ho has travelled much in western Canada 
who has not now and then been entertained in homes 
where either the man orw^oman of the household was 
of mixed blood, and in such homes I have found a 
high degree of refinement and the most polished 
manners. Usually one needs the information that 
such persons possess such blood. After that the 
peculiar black hair and certain facial features in the 
subject of such gossip attest the truthfulness of the 
assertion. There is no rule for measuring the char- 
acter and quality of this plastic, receptive, and often 
very ambitious element in Canadian society, yet one 
may say broadly that the social position and attain- 
ments of these people have been greatly influenced 
by the nationality of their fathers. For instance, the 
French habitants and woodsmen far, far too often 
sank to the level of their wives when they married 
Indian women. Light-hearted, careless, unambitious, 
and drifting to the wilderness because of the absence 
of restraint there ; illiterate, of coarse origin, fond of 



220 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

whiskey and gambling — they threw off superiority to 
the Indian, and evaded responsibihty and concern in 
home management. Of course this is not a rule, but 
a tendency. On the other hand, the Scotch and 
English forced their wives up to their own standards. \ 
Their own home training, respect for more than the 
forms of religion, their love of home and of a perma. 
nent patch of ground of their own — all these had 
their effect, and that has been to rear half-breed chil- 
dren in proud and comfortable homes, to send them 
to mix with the children of cultivated persons in old 
communities, and to fit them with pride and ambition 
and cultivation for an equal start in the journey of 
life. Possessing such foundation for it, the equality 
has happily never been denied to them in Canada. 

To-day the service is very little more inviting than 
in the olden time. The loneliness and removal from 
the touch of civilization remain throuo^hout a vast 
region ; the arduous journeys by sled and canoe re- 
main ; the dangers of flood and frost are undimin- 
ished. Unfortunately, among the changes made by 
time, one is that which robs the present factor's sur- 
roundings of a great part of that which was most 
picturesque. Of all the prettinesses of the Indian 
costuming one sees now only a trace here and there 
in a few tribes, while in many the moccasin and 
tepee, and in some only the moccasin, remain. The 
birch-bark canoe and the snow-shoe are the main 
reliance of both races, but the steamboat has been 
impressed into parts of the service, and most of the 
descendants of the old-time voyagcur preserve only 
liis worsted belt, his knife, and his cap and mocca- 



"talking musquash 223 

sins at the utmost. In places the engage has become 
a mere deck-hand. His scarlet paddle has rotted 
away ; he no longer awakens the echoes of forest or 
caiion with cJiansons that died in the throats of a 
generation that has gone. In return, the horrors of 
intertribal war and of a precarious foothold among 
fierce and turbulent bands have nearly vanished ; 
but there was a spice in them that added to the fas- 
cination of the service. 

The dogs and sleds form a very interesting part of 
the Hudson Bay outfit. One does not need to go 
very deep into western Canada to meet with them. 
As close to our centre of population as Nipigon, on 
Lake Superior, the only roads into the north are the 
rivers and lakes, traversed by canoes in summer and 
sleds in winter. The dogs are of a peculiar breed, 
and are called " huskies " — undoubtedly a corruption 
of the word Esquimaux. They preserve a closer re- 
semblance to the wolf than an}'^ of our domesticated 
dogs, and exhibit their kinship with that scavenger 
of the wilderness in their nature as well as their 
looks. To-day their females, if tied and left in the 
forest, will often attest companionship with its deni- 
zens by bringing forth litters of wolfish progeny. 
Moreover, it will not be necessary to feed all with 
whom the experiment is tried, for the wolves will be 
apt to bring food to them as long as they are thus 
neglected by man. They are often as large as the 
ordinary Newfoundland dog, but their legs are short- 
er, and even more hairy, and the hair along their 
necks, from their shoulders to their skulls, stands 
erect in a thick, bristling mass. They have the long 



224 O^' CANADA S FRONTIER 

snouts, sharp -pointed ears, and the tails of wolves^ 
and their cry is a yelp rather than a bark. Like 
wolves they are apt to yelp in chorus at sunrise and 
at sunset. They delight in worrying peaceful ani- 
mals, setting their own numbers against one, and 
they will kill cows, or even children, if they get the 
chance. They are disciplined only when at work^ 
and are then so surprisingly obedient, tractable, and 
industrious as to plainly show that though their nat- 
ure is savage and wolfish, they could be reclaimed by 
domestication. In isolated cases plenty of them are. 
As it is, in their packs, their battles among them- 
selves are terrible, and they are dangerous when 
loose. In some districts it is the custom to turn 
them loose in summer on little islands in the lakes» 
leaving them to hunger or feast according as the 
supply of dead fish thrown upon the shore is small 
or plentiful. When they are kept in dog quarters 
they are simply penned up and fed during the sum- 
mer, so that the savage side of their nature gets full 
play during long periods. Fish is their principal 
diet, and stores of dried fish are kept for their winter 
food. Corn meal is often fed to them also. Like a 
wolf or an Indian, a " husky" gets along without food 
when there is not any, and will eat his own weight 
of it when it is plenty. 

A typical dog-sled is very like a toboggan. It' is 
formed of two thin pieces of oak or birch lashed to- 
gether with buckskin thongs and turned up high in 
front. It is usually about nine feet in length by six- 
teen inches wide. A leather cord is run along the 
outer edges for fastening whatever may be put upon 



"TALKING musquash" 225 

the sled. Varying numbers of dogs are harnessed to 
such sleds, but the usual number is four. Traces, 
collars, and backhands form the harness, and the dogs 
are hitched one before the other. Very often the 
collars are completed with sets of sleigh-bells, and 
sometimes the harness is otherwise ornamented with 
beads, tassels, fringes, or ribbons. The leader, or fore- 
goer, is always the best in the team. The dog 
next to him is called the steady dog, and the last is 
named the steer dog. As a rule, these faithful ani- 
mals are treated harshly, if not brutally. It is a 
Hudson Bay axiom that no man who cannot curse 
in three languages is fit to drive them. The three 
profanities are, of course, English, French, and Ind- 
ian, though whoever has heard the Northwest French 
knows that it ought to serve by itself, as it is half- 
soled with Anglo-Saxon oaths and heeled with Ind- 
ian obscenity. The rule with whoever goes on a 
dog-sled journey is that the driver, or mock-passenger, 
runs behind the dogs. The main function of the 
sled is to carry the dead weight, the burdens of tent- 
covers, blankets, food, and the like. The men run 
along with or behind the dogs, on snow-shoes, and 
when the dogs make better time than horses are able 
to, and will carry between 200 and 300 pounds over 
daily distances of from 20 to 35 miles, according to 
the condition of the ice or snow, and that many a 
journey of 1000 miles has been performed in this 
way, and some of 2000 miles, the test of human en- 
durance is as great as that of canine grit. 

Men travelling " light," with extra sleds for the 
freight, and men on short journeys often ride in the 

15 



226 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

sleds, which in such cases are fitted up as " carioles " 
for the purpose. I have heard an unauthenticated 
account, by a Hudson Bay man, of men who drove 
themselves, disciplining refractory or lazy dogs by 
simply pulling them in beside or over the dash-board, 
and holding them down by the neck while they 
thrashed them. A story is told of a worthy bishop 
who complained of the slow progress his sled was 
making, and was told that it was useless to complain, 
as the dogs would not work unless they were round- 
ly and incessantly cursed. After a time the bishop 
gave his driver absolution for the profanity needed 
for the remainder of the journey, and thenceforth 
sped ov^er the snow at a gallop, every stroke of the 
half-breed's long and cruel whip being sent home 
with a volley of wicked words, emphasized at times 
with peltings with sharp -edged bits of ice. Kane, 
the explorer, made an average of 57 miles a day be- 
hind these shaggy little brutes. Milton and Cheadle, 
in their book, mention instances where the dogs made 
140 miles in less than 48 hours, and the Bishop of 
Rupert's Land told me he had covered 20 miles in 
a forenoon and 20 in the afternoon of the same day, 
without causing his dogs to exhibit evidence of fa- 
tieue. The best time is made on hard snow and ice, 
of course, and when the conditions suit, the drivers 
whip off their snow-shoes to trot behind the dogs 
more easily. In view of what they do, it is no won- 
der that many of the Northern Indians, upon first 
seeing horses, named them simply " big dog." But 
to me the performances of the drivers are the more 
wonderful. It was a white youth, son of a factor, 






!E»^ 




WW- 


J 


J» 



" TALKING MUSQUASH " 229 

who ran behind the bishop's dogs in the spurt of 40 
miles by daylight that I mention. The men who do 
such work explain that the " lope " of the dogs is pe- 
culiarly suited to the dog-trot of a human being. 

A picture of a factor on a round of his outposts, or 
of a chief factor racing through a great district, will 
now be intelligible. If he is riding, he fancies that 
princes and lords would envy him could they see his 
luxurious comfort. Fancy him in a dog-cariole of 
the best pattern — a little suggestive of a burial cas- 
ket, to be sure, in its shape, but gaudily painted, and 
so full of soft warm furs that the man within is en- 
veloped like a chrysalis in a cocoon. Perhaps there 
are Russian bells on the collars of the dogs, and 
their harness is "Frenchified" with bead-work and 
tassels. The air, which fans only his face, is crisp 
and invigorating, and before him the lake or stream 
over which he rides is a sheet of virgin snow — not 
nature's winding-sheet, as those who cannot love 
nature have said, but rather a robe of beautiful er- 
mine fringed and embroidered with dark evergreen, 
and that in turn flecked at every point with snow, as 
if bejewelled with pearls. If the factor chats with 
his driver, who falls behind at rough places to keep 
the sled from tipping over, their conversation is car- 
ried on at so high a tone as to startle the birds into 
flight, if there are any, and to shock the scene as by 
the greatest rudeness possible in that then vast, silent 
land. If silence is kept, the factor reads the prints 
of game in the snow, of foxes' pads and deer hoofs, of 
wolf splotches, and the queer hieroglyphics of birds, 

or the dots and troughs of rabbit-trailing. To him 

15* 



230 ON CANADA'S FRONTIER 

these are as legible as the Morse alphabet to telegra- 
phers, and as important as stock quotations to the 
pallid men of Wall .Street. 

Suddenly in the distance he sees a human figure. 
Time was that his predecessors would have stopped 
to discuss the situation and its dangers, for the sight 
of one Indian suggested the presence of more, and 
the question came, were these friendly or fierce ? 
But now the sled hurries on. It is only an Indian 
or half-breed hunter minding his traps, of which he 
may have a sufTficient number to give him a circuit 
of ten or more miles away from and back to his 
lodge or village. He is approached and hailed by 
the driver, and with some pretty name very often — 
one that may mean in English " hawk flying across 
the sky when the sun is setting," or " blazing sun," or 
whatever. On goes the sled, and perhaps a village is 
the next object of interest ; not a village in our sense 
of the word, but now and then a tepee or a hut peep- 
ing above the brush beside the water, the eye being 
led to them by the signs of slothful disorder close by 
— the rotting canoe frame, the bones, the dirty tat- 
tered blankets, the twig-formed skeleton of a steam 
bath, such as Indians resort to when tired or sick or 
uncommonly dirty, the worn-out snow-shoes hung on 
a tree, and the racks of frozen fish or dried meat here 
and there. A dog rushes down to the water- side 
barking furiously — an Indian dog of the currish type 
of paupers' dogs the world around — ^and this stirs 
the village pack, and brings out the squaws, who are 
addressed, as the trapper up the stream was, by 
some poetic names, albeit poetic license is sometimes 



"talking musquash 231 

strained to form names not at all pretty to polite 
senses, " All Stomach " being that of one dusky prin- 
cess, and serving to indicate the lengths to which 
poesy may lead the untrammelled mind. 

The sun sinks early, and if our traveller be jour- 
neying in the West and be a lover of nature, heaven 
send that his face be turned towards the sunset ! 
Then, be the sky anything but completely storm- 
draped, he will see a sight so glorious that eloquence 
becomes a naked suppliant for alms beyond the gift 
of language when set to describe it. A few clouds 
are necessary to its perfection, and then they take on 
celestial dyes, and one sees, above the vanished sun, 
a blaze of golden yellow thinned into a tone that is 
luminous crystal. This is flanked by belts and 
breasts of salmon and ruby red, and all melt towards 
the zenith into a rose tone that has body at the base, 
but pales at top into a mere blush. This I have 
seen night after night on the lakes and the plains 
and on the mountains. But as the glory of it beck- 
ons the traveller ever towards itself, so the farther he 
follows, the more brilliant and gaudy will be his re- 
ward. Beyond the mountains the valleys and waters 
are more and more enriched, until, at the Pacific, 
even San Francisco's shabby sand-hills stir poetry 
and reverence in the soul by their borrowed magnifi- 
cence. 

The travellers soon stop to camp for the night, 
and while the " breed " falls to at the laborious but 
quick and simple work, the factor either helps or 
smokes his pipe. A sight-seer or sportsman would 
have set his man to bobbing for jack -fish or lake 



232 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

trout, or would have stopped a while to bag a par- 
tridge, or mio^ht have boudit whatever of this sort 
the trapper or Indian village boasted, but, ten to one,, 
this meal would be of bacon and bread or dried 
meat, and perhaps some flapjacks, such as would 
bring coin to a doctor in the city, but which seem 
ethereal and delicious in the wilderness, particularly 
if made half an inch thick, saturated with grease, well 
browned, and eaten while at the temperature and 
consistency of molten lava. 

The sled is pulled up by the bank, the ground is 
cleared for a fire, wood and brush are cut, and the 
deft laborer starts the flame in a tent-like pyramid of 
kindlings no higher or broader than a teacup. This 
tiny fire he spreads by adding fuel until he has con- 
structed and led up to a conflagration of logs as 
thick as his thighs, cleverly planned with a backlog 
and glowing fire bed, and a sapling bent over the 
hottest part to hold a pendent kettle on its tip. The 
dogs will have needed disciplining long before this, 
and if the driver be like many of his kind, and works 
himself into a fury, he will not hesitate to seize one 
and send his teeth together throuoh its hide after he 
has beaten it until he is tired. The point of order 
having thus been raised and carried, the shaggy, 
often handsome, animals will be minded to forget 
their private grudges and quarrels, and, seated on 
their haunches, with their intelligent faces towards 
the fire, will watch the cooking intently. The pocket- 
knives or sheath-knives of the men will be apt to be 
the only table implement in use at the meal. Cana- 
da had reached the possession of seigniorial man- 



"talking musquash 235 

sions of great character before any other knife was 
brought to table, though the ladies used costly blades 
set in precious and beautiful handles. To-day the 
axe ranks the knife in the wilderness, but he who 
has a knife can make and furnish his own table — 
and his house also, for that matter. 

Supper over, and a glass of grog having been put 
down, with w'ater from the hole in the ice whence 
the liquid for the inevitable tea was gotten, the 
nights rest is begun. The method for this varies. 
As good men as ever walked have asked nothing 
more cosey than a snug warm trough in the snow and 
a blanket or a robe; but perhaps this traveller will 
call for a shake-down of balsam boughs, with all the 
furs out of the sled for his covering. If nicer yet, he 
may order a low hollow chamber of three sides of 
banked snow, and a superstructure of crotched sticks 
and cross-poles, with canvas thrown over it. Every 
man to his quality, of course, and that of the servant 
calls for simply a blanket. With that he sleeps as 
soundly as if he w^ere Santa Claus and only stirred 
once a year. Then will fall upon what seems the 
whole world the mighty hush of the wilderness, 
broken only occasionally by the hoot of an owl, the 
cry of a wolf, the deep thug of the straining ice on 
the lake, or the snoring of the men and dogs. But 
if the earth seems asleep, not so the sky. The magic 
shuttle of the aurora borealis is ofttimes at work up 
over that North country, sending its shifting lights 
weaving across the firmament with a tremulous brill- 
iancy and energy we in this country get but pale 
hints of when we see the phenomenon at all. Flash- 



236 ON Canada's frontier 

ing and palpitating incessantly, the rose-tinted waves 
and luminous white bars leap across the sky or dart 
up and down it in manner so fantastic and so force- 
ful, even despite their shadowy thinness, that travel- 
lers have fancied themselves deaf to some seraphic 
sound that they believed such commotion must pro- 
duce. 

An incident of this typical journey I am describing 
would, at more than one season, be a meeting with 
some band of Indians going to a post with furs for 
barter. Though the bulk of these hunters fetch their 
quarry in the spring and early summer, some may 
come at any time. The procession may be only that 
of a family or of the two or more families that live to- 
gether or as neighbors. The man, if there is but one 
group, is certain to be stalking ahead, carrying noth- 
ing but his gun. Then come the women, laden like 
pack-horses. They may have a sled packed with the 
furs and drawn by a dog or two, and an extra dog 
may bear a balanced load on his back, but the squaw 
is certain to have a spine -warping burden of meat 
and a battered kettle and a pappoose, and whatever 
personal property of any and every sort she and her 
liege lord own. Children who can walk have to do 
so, but it sometimes happens that a baby a year and 
a half or two years old is on her back, while a new- 
born infant, swaddled in blanket stuff, and bagged 
and tied like a Bologna sausage, surmounts the load 
on the sled. A more tatterdemalion outfit than a 
band of these pauperized savages form it would be 
difficult to imagine. On the plains they will have 
liorses dragging travoises, dogs with travoises, women 



"talking musquash 237 

and children loaded with impedimenta, a colt or two 
running loose, the lordly men riding free, straggling 
curs a plent}', babies in arms, babies swaddled, and 
toddlers afoot, and the whole battalion presenting at 
its exposed points exhibits of torn blankets, raw meat, 
distorted pots and pans, tent, poles, and rusty traps, 
in all eloquently suggestive of an eviction in the 
slums of a great city. 

I speak thus of these people not willingly, but out 
of the necessity of truth-telling. The Indian east of 
the Rocky Mountains is to me the subject of an ad- 
miration which is the stronger the more nearly I find 
him as he was in his prime. It is not his fault that 
most of his race have degenerated. It is not our 
fault that we have better uses for the continent 
than those to which he put it. But it is our fault 
that he is, as I have seen him, shivering in a cotton 
tepee full of holes, and turning around and around 
before a fire of wet wood to keep from freezing to 
death ; furnished meat if he has been fierce enough 
to make us fear him, left to starve if he has been do- 
cile ; taught, aye, forced to beg, mocked at by a re- 
ligion he cannot understand, from the mouths of men 
who apparently will not understand him ; debauched 
with rum, despoiled by the lust of white men in every ' 
form that lust can take. Ah, it is a sickening stor)^' 
Not in Canada, do you say? Why, in the northern 
wilds of Canada are districts peopled by beggars who 
have been in such pitiful stress for food and covering 
that the Hudson Bay Company has kept them alive 
with advances of provisions and blankets winter after 
winter. They are Indians who in their strength 



238 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

never Qrave the Government the concern it now fails 
to show for their weakness. The great fur company 
has thus added generosity to its long career of just 
dealing with these poor adult children ; for it is a fact 
that though the company has made what profit it 
might, it has not, in a century at least, cheated the 
Indians, or made false representations to them, or 
lost their good -will and respect by any feature of its 
policy towards them. Its relation to them has been 
paternal, and they owe none of their degradation 
to it. 

I have spoken of the visits of the natives to the 
posts. There are two other arrivals of great con- 
sequence — the coming of the supplies, and of the 
winter mail or packet. I have seen the provisions 
and trade goods being put up in bales in the great 
mercantile storehouse of the company in Winnipeg 
— a store like a combination of a Sixth Avenue 
ladies' bazaar and one of our wholesale grocers' shops 
— and I have seen such weights of canned vegetables 
and canned plum-pudding and bottled ale and other 
luxuries that I am sure that in some posts there is 
good living on high days and holidays if not always. 
The stores are packed in parcels averaging sixty 
pounds (and sometimes one hundred), to make them 
convenient for handling on the portages — " for pack- 
ing them over the carries," as our traders used to 
say. It is in following these supplies that we be 
come most keenly sensible of the changes time has 
wrought in the methods of the company. The day 
was, away back in the era of the Northwest Com- 
pany, that the goods for the posts went up the Ottawa 



" TALKING MUSQUASH " 241 

from Montreal in great canoes manned by hardy voy- 
ageurs in picturesque costumes, wielding scarlet pad- 
dles, and stirring the forests with their happy songs. 
The scene shifted, the companies blended, and the 
centre of the trade moved from old Fort William, 
close to where Port Arthur now is on Lake Superior, 
up to Winnipeg, on the Red River of the North. 
Then the Canadians and their cousins, the half-breeds, 
more picturesque than ever, and manning the great 
York boats of the Hudson Bay Company, swept in a 
long train through Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, 
and thence by a marvellous water route all the way 
to the Rockies and the Arctic, sendino- off freight for 
side districts at fixed points along the course. The 
main factories on this line, maintained as such for 
more than a century, bear names whose very mention 
stirs the blood of one who knows the romantic, pictu- 
resque, and poetic history and atmosphere of the old 
company when it was the landlord (in part, and in 
part monopolist) of a territory that cut into our North- 
west and Alaska, and swept from Labrabor to Van- 
couver Island. Northward and westward, by waters 
emptying into Hudson Bay, the brigade of great boats 
worked through a region embroidered with sheets 
and ways of water. The system that was next en- 
tered, and which bore more nearly due west, bends 
and bulges with lakes and straits like a ribbon all 
curved and knotted. Thus, at a great portage, the 
divide was reached and crossed ; and so the waters 
flowing to the Arctic, and one — the Peace River — 
rising beyond the Rockies, were met and travelled. 

This was the way and the method until after the Ca- 
16 



242 OX CANADA S FRONTIER 

nadian Pacific Railway was built, but now the Winni- 
peg route is of subordinate importance, and feeds only 
the region near the west side of Hudson Bay. The 
Northern supplies now go by rail from Calgary, in 
Alberta, over the plains by the new Edmonton rail- 
road. From Edmonton the goods go by cart to Atha- 
basca Landing, there to be laden on a steamboat, 
which takes them northward until some rapids are 
met, and avoided by the use of a singular combina- 
tion of bateaux and tramway rails. After a slow prog- 
ress of fifteen miles another steamboat is met, and 
thence they follow the Athabasca, through Atha- 
basca Lake, and so on up to a second rapids, on the 
Great Slave River this time, where oxen and carts 
carry them across a sixteen -mile portage to a screw 
steamer, which finishes the 3000-mile journey to the 
North. Of course the shorter branch routes, dis- 
tributing the goods on either side of the main track, 
are still traversed by canoes and hardy fellows in 
the old way, but with shabby accessories of cos- 
tume and spirit. These boatmen, when they come 
to a portage, produce their tomplines, and " pack" 
the goods to the next waterway. By means of these 
" lines" they carry great weights, resting on their 
backs, but supported from their skulls, over which 
the strong straps are passed. 

The winter mail-packet, starting from Winnipeg in 
the depth of the season, goes to all the posts by dog 
train. The letters and papers are packed in great 
boxes and strapped to the sleds, beside or behind 
which the drivers trot along, cracking their lashes 
and pelting and cursing the dogs. A more direct 



"TALKING musquash" 243 

course than the old Lake Winnipeg way has usually 
been followed by this packet ; but it is thought that 
the route iv/^ Edmonton and Athabasca Landinorwill 
serve better yet, so that another change may be made. 
This is a small exhibition as compared with the bri- 
gade that takes the supplies, or those others that 
come plashing down the streams and across the coun- 
try with the furs every year. But only fancy how 
eagerly this solitary semi-annual mail is waited for ! 
It is a little speck on the snow-wrapped upper end of 
all North America. It cuts a tiny trail, and here and 
there lesser black dots move off from it to cut still 
slenderer threads, zigzagging to the side factories and 
lesser posts ; but we may be sure that if human eyes 
could see so far, all those of the white men in all that 
vast tangled system of trading centres would be watch- 
ing the little caravan, until at last each pair fell upon 
the expected missives from the throbbing world this 
.side of the border. 



VIII 







CANADA S EL DORADO 

HERE is on this continent a terri- 
tory of imperial extent which is 
one of the Canadian sisterhood of 
States, and yet of which small ac- 
count has been taken by those 
who discuss either the most ad- 
vantageous relations of trade or 
that closer intimacy so often re- 
ferred to as a possibility in the fut- 
ure of our country and its north- 
ern neighbor. Although British 
Columbia is advancing in rank 
among the provinces of the Do- 
minion by reason of its abundant 
natural resources, it is not remark- 
able that we read and hear little 
concerning it. The people in it 
are few, and the knowledge of it is 
even less in proportion. It is but 
partially explored, and for what 
can be learned of it one must catch 
up information piecemeal from blue-books, the pam- 
phlets of scientists, from tales of adventure, and from 
the less trustworthy literature composed to attract 
travellers and settlers. 




CANADA S EL DORADO 245 

It would severely strain the slender facts to make 
a sizable pamphlet of the history of British Columbia. 
A wandering and imaginative Greek called Juan de 
Fuca told his people that he had discovered a passage 
from ocean to ocean between this continent and a 
great island in the Pacific. Sent there to seize and 
fortify it, he disappeared — at least from history. This 
was about 1592. In 177S Captain Cook roughly sur- 
veyed the coast, and in 1 792 Captain Vancouver, who 
as a boy had been with Cook on two voyages, ex- 
amined the sound between the island and the main- 
land with great care, hoping to find that it led to the 
main water system of the interior. He gave to the 
strait at the entrance the nickname of the Greek, 
and in the following year received the transfer of 
authority over the country from the Spanish com- 
missioner Bodega of Quadra, then established there. 
The two put aside false modesty, and named the 
great island " the Island of Vancouver and Quadra." 
At the time the English sailor was there it chanced 
that he met that hardy old homespun baronet Sir 
Alexander Mackenzie, who was the first man to cross 
the continent, making the astonishing journey in a 
canoe manned by Iroquois Indians. The main-land 
became known as New Caledonia. It took its pres- 
ent name from the Columbia River, and that, in turn, 
got its name from the ship Columbia, of Boston, Cap- 
tain Gray, which entered its mouth in 1792, long 
after the Spaniards had known the stream and called 
it the Oregon. The rest is quickly told. The re- 
gion passed into the hands of the fur-traders. Van- 
couver Island became a crown colony in 1849, ^^<i 



246 ON Canada's frontier 

British Columbia followed in 1858. They were 
united in 1866, and joined the Canadian confedera- 
tion in 1 87 1. Three years later the province ex- 
ceeded both Manitoba and Prince Edward Island in 
the value of its exports, and also showed an excess of 
exports over imports. It has a Lieutenant-governor 
and Legislative Assembly, and is represented at Ot- 
tawa in accordance with the Canadian system. Its 
people have been more closely related to ours in busi- 
ness than those of any other province, and they en- 
tertain a warm friendly feeling towards "the States." 
In the larger cities the Fourth of July is informally 
but generally observed as a holiday. 

British Columbia is of immense size. It is as ex- 
tensive as the combination of New England, the 
Middle States and Maryland, the Virginias, the Caro- 
linas, and Georgia, leaving Delaware out. It is larger 
than Texas, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New Hamp- 
shire joined together. Yet it has been all but over- 
looked by man, and may be said to be an empire 
with only one wagon road, and that is but a blind 
artery halting in the middle of the country. But 
whoever follows this necessarily incomplete survey 
of what man has found that region to be, and of what 
his yet puny hands have drawn from it, will dismiss 
the popular and natural suspicion that it is a wilder- 
ness worthy of its present fate. Until the whole 
globe is banded with steel rails and yields to the 
plough, we will continue to regard whatever region 
lies beyond our doors as waste-land, and to fancy that 
every line of latitude has its own unvarying climatic 
characteristics. There is an opulent civilization in 



CANADA S EL DORADO 247 

what we once were taught was " the Great Ameri- 
can Desert," and far up at Edmonton, on the Peace 
River, farming flourishes despite the fact that it is 
where our school-books located a zone of perpetual 
snow. Farther along we shall study a country 
crossed by the same parallels of latitude that dissect 
inhospitable Labrador, and we shall discover that as 
ereat a difference exists between the two shores of 
the continent on that zone as that which distinguish- 
es California from Massachusetts. Upon the coast 
of this ncQ-lected corner of the world we shall see 
that a climate like that of England is produced, as 
England's is, by a warm current in the sea ; in the 
southern half of the interior we shall discover valleys 
as inviting as those in our New England ; and far 
north, at Port Simpson, just below the down-reaching 
claw of our Alaska, we shall find such a climate as 
Halifax enjoys. 

British Columbia has a length of 800 miles, and 
averages 400 miles in width. To whoever crosses 
the country it seems the scene of a vast earth-dis- 
turbance, over which mountains are scattered with- 
out system. In fact, however, the Cordillera belt is 
there divided into four ranges, the Rockies forming 
the eastern boundary, then the Gold Range, then the 
Coast Range, and, last of all, that partially submerged 
chain whose upraised parts form Vancouver and the 
other mountainous islands near the main-land in the 
Pacific. A vast valley flanks the south-western side 
of the Rocky Mountains, accompanying them from 
where they leave our North-western States in a wide 
straight furrow for a distance of 700 miles. Such 



248 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

great rivers as the Columbia, the Fraser, the Parsnip, 
the Kootenay, and the Finlay are encountered in it. 
While it has a ksser agricultural value than other 
valleys in the province, its mineral possibilities are 
considered to be very great, and when, as must be the 
case, it is made the route of communication between 
one end of the territory and the other, a vast timber 
supply will be rendered marketable. 

The Gold Range, next to the westward, is not bald, 
like the Rockies, but, excepting the higher peaks, is 
timbered with a dense forest growth. Those busiest 
of all British Columbian explorers, the " prospectors," 
have found much of this system too difificult even for 
their pertinacity. But the character of the region is 
well understood. Here are high plateaus of rolling 
country, and in the mountains are glaciers and snow 
fields. Between this system and the Coast Range is 
what is called the Interior Plateau, averaging one 
hundred miles in width, and following the trend of 
that portion of the continent, with an elevation that 
grows less as the north is approached. This plateau 
is crossed and followed by valleys that take every di- 
rection, and these are the seats of rivers and water, 
courses. In the southern part of this plateau is the 
best grazing land in the province, and much fine ag- 
ricultural country, while in the north, where the cli- 
mate is more moist, the timber increases, and parts 
of the land are thought to be convertible into farms. 
Next comes the Coast Range, whose western slopes 
are enriched by the milder climate of the coast ; and 
beyond lies the remarkably tattered shore of the 
Pacific, lapped by a sheltered sea, verdant, indented 



CANADA S EL DORADO 249 

by numberless inlets, which, in turn, are faced by un- 
counted islands, and receive the discharge of almost 
as many streams and rivers — a wondrously beautiful 
region, forested by giant trees, and resorted to by 
numbers of fish exceeding calculation and belief. 
Beyond the coast is the bold chain of mountains 
of which Vancouver Island and the Queen Char- 
lotte Islands are parts. Here is a vast treasure in 
that coal which our naval experts have found to 
be the best on the Pacific coast, and here also are 
traces of metals, whose value industry has not yet 
established. 

It is a question whether this vast territory has yet 
100,000 white inhabitants. Of Indians it has but 
20,000, and of Chinese about 8000. It is a vast land 
of silence, a huge tract slowly changing from the 
field and pleasure-ground of the fur-trader and sports- 
man to the quarry of the miner. The Canadian Pa- 
cific Railway crosses it, revealing to the immigrant 
and the globe-trotter an unceasing panorama of 
grand, wild, and beautiful scenery unequalled on this 
continent. During a few hours the traveller sees, 
across the majestic cafion of the Fraser, the neglected 
remains of the old Cariboo stage road, built under 
pressure of the gold craze. It demonstrated surpris- 
ing energy in the baby colony, for it connected Yale, 
at the head of short steam navigation on the Fra- 
ser, with Barkerville, in the distant Cariboo country, 
400 miles away, and it cost $500,000. The traveller 
sees here and there an Indian village or a " mission," 
and now and then a tiny town ; but for the most 
part his eye scans only the primeval forest, lofty 



250 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

mountains, valleys covered with trees as beasts are 
with fur, cascades, turbulent streams, and huge shel- 
tered lakes. Except at the stations, he sees few 
men. Now he notes a group of Chinamen at work 
on the railway ; anon he sees an Indian upon a 
clumsy perch and searching the Fraser for salmon, 
or in a canoe paddling towards the gorgeous sunset 
that confronts the daily west-bound train as it rolls 
by great Shuswap Lake. 

But were the same traveller out of the train, and 
gifted with the power to make himself ubiquitous, 
he would still be, for the most part, lonely. Down in 
the smiling bunch -grass valleys in the south he 
would see here and there the outfit of a farmer or 
the herds of a cattle-man. A burst of noise would 
astonish him near by, in the Kootenay country, 
where the new silver mines are being worked, where 
claims have been taken up by the thousand, and 
whither a railroad is hastening. Here and there, at 
points out of sight one from another, he would hear 
the crash of a lumberman's axe, the report of a hun- 
ter's rifle, or the crackle of an Indian's fire. On the 
P'raser he would find a little town called Yale, and 
on the coast the streets and ambitious buildings and 
busy wharves of Vancouver would astonish him. 
Victoria, across the strait, a town of larger size and 
remarkable beauty, would give him company, and 
near Vancouver and Victoria the little cities of New 
Westminster and Nanaimo (lumber and coal ports 
respectively) would rise before him. There, close to- 
gether, he would see more than half the population 
of the province. 





AN IMPRESSION OF SHUSWAP LAKE 
BRITISH COLUMBIA 



'f-'^a/ff/fi. 



Fancy his isolation as 
he looked around him in 
the northern half of the ter- 
ritory, where a few trails lead to fewer posts of the 
Hudson Bay Company, where the endless forests and 
multitudinous lakes and streams are cut by but infre- 
quent paddles in the hands of a race that has lost 
one-third its numerical strength in the last ten years, 
where the only true homes are within the palisades 
or the unguarded log-cabin of the fur-trading agents, 
and where the only other white men are either wash- 
ing sand in the river bars, driving the stages of the 
only line that penetrates a piece of the country, or 
are those queer devil-may-care but companionable 
Davy Crocketts of the day who are guides now and 
then, hunters half the time, placer-miners when they 
please, and whatever else there is a call for between- 
times ! 



252 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

A very strange sight that my supposititious trav- 
eller would pause long to look at would be the herds 
of wild horses that defy the Queen, her laws, and her 
subjects in the Lillooet Valley. There are thousands 
of them there, and over in the Nicola and Chilcotin 
country, on either side of the Fraser, north of Wash- 
ington State. They were originally of good stock, 
but now they not only defy capture, but eat valuable 
grass, and spoil every horse turned out to graze. The 
newspapers aver that the Government must soon be 
called upon to devise means for ridding the valleys 
of this nuisance. This is one of those sections which 
promise well for future stock-raising and agricultural 
operations. There are plenty such. The Nicola 
Valley has been settled twenty years, and there are 
many cattle there, on numerous ranches. It is good 
land, but rather high for grain, and needs irrigation. 
The snowfall varies greatly in all these valleys, but in 
ordinary winters horses and cattle manage well with 
four to six weeks' feeding. On the upper Kootenay, 
a valley eight to ten miles wide, ranching began a 
quarter of a century ago, during the gold excitement. 
The "cow -men" raise grain for themselves there. 
This valley is 3000 feet high. The Okanagon Val- 
ley is lower, and is only from two to five miles wide, 
but both are of similar character, of very great length, 
and are crossed and intersected by branch valleys. 
The greater part of the Okanagon does not need 
irrisfatins. A beautiful country is the Kettle River 
region, along the boundary between the Columbia 
and the Okanasron. It is narrow, but flat and smooth 
on the bottom, and the land is very fine. Bunch-grass 



CANADA S EL DORADO 



-d:> 



covers the hills around it for a distance of from four 
hundred to five hundred feet, and there timber be- 
gins. It is only in occasional years that the Kettle 
River Valley needs water. In the Spallumcheen Val- 
ley one farmer had 500 acres in grain last summer, 
and the most modern agricultural machinery is in use 
there. These are mere notes of a few among almost 
innumerable valleys that are clothed with bunch- 
grass, and that often possess the characteristics of 
beautiful parks. In many wheat can be and is raised, 
possibly in most of them. I have notes of the suc- 
cessful growth of peaches, and of the growth of al- 
mond-trees to a height of fourteen feet in four years, 
both in the Okanagon country. 

The shooting in these valleys is most alluring to 
those who are fond of the sport. Caribou, deer, bear, 
prairie-chicken, and partridges abound in them. In 
all probability there is no similar extent of country 
that equals the valley of the Columbia, from which, 
in the winter of 1888, between six and eight tons of 
deer-skins were shipped by local traders, the result 
of lesfitimate huntino^. But the forests and mount- 
ains are as they were when the white man first saw 
them, and though the beaver and sea-otter, the mar- 
ten, and those foxes whose furs are coveted by the 
rich, are not as abundant as they once were, the rest 
of the game is most plentiful. On the Rockies and 
on the Coast Range the mountain-goat, most difficult 
of beasts to hunt, and still harder to get, is abundant 
yet. The "big-horn," or mountain-sheep, is not so 
common, but the hunting thereof is usually success- 
ful if good guides are obtained. The cougar, the 



^54 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

grizzly, and the lynx are all plentiful, and black and 
brown bears are very numerous. Elk are going the 
way of the " big-horn "—are preceding that creature, 
■in fact. Pheasants (imported), grouse, quail, and 
water-fowl are among the feathered game, and the 
river and lake fishing is such as is not approached 
in any other part of the Dominion. The province 
is a sportsman's Eden, but the hunting of big game 
there is not a venture to be lightly undertaken. It 
is not alone the distance or the cost that gives one 
pause, for, after the province is reached, the mountain- 
climbino- is a task that no amount of wealth will 
lighten. And these are genuine mountains, by-the- 
way, wearing eternal caps of snow^ and equally eter- 
nal deceit as to their distances, their heights, and as 
to all else concerning which a rarefied atmosphere 
can hocus-pocus a stranger. There is one animal, 
king of all the beasts, which the most unaspiring 
hunter may chance upon as well as the bravest, and 
that animal carries a perpetual chip upon its shoul- 
der, and seldom turns from an encounter. It is the 
grizzly-bear. It is his presence that gives you either 
zest or pause, as you may decide, in hunting all the 
others that roam the mountains. Yet, in that hun- 
ter's dream-land it is the grizzly that attracts many 
sportsmen every year. 

From the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Compa- 
ny in Victoria I obtained the list of animals in whose 
skins that company trades at that station. It makes 
a formidable catalogue of zoological products, and 
is as follows : Bears (brown, black, grizzly), beaver, 
badger, foxes (silver, cross, and red), fishers, mar- 



CANADA S EL DORADO 255 

tens, minks, lynxes, musk-rat, otter (sea or land), pan- 
ther, raccoon, wolves (black, gray, and coyote), black- 
tailed deer, stags (a true stag, growing to the size of 
an ox, and found on the hills of Vancouver Island), 
caribou or reindeer, hares, mountain- goat, big-horn 
(or mountain-sheep), moose (near the Rockies), wood- 
buffalo (found in the north, not greatly different from 
the bison, but larger), geese, swans, and duck. 

The British Columbian Indians are of such unpre- 
possessing appearance that one hears with compara- 
tive equanimity of their numbering only 20,000 in 
all, and of their rapid shrinkage, owing principally to 
the vices of their women. They are, for the most 
part, canoe Indians, in the interior as well as on the 
coast, and they are (as one might suppose a nation 
of tailors would become) short-legged, and with those 
limbs small and inclined to bow. On the other 
hand, their exercise with the paddle has given them 
a disproportionate development of their shoulders 
and chests, so that, being too large above and too 
small below, their appearance is very peculiar. They 
are fish -eaters the year around ; and though some, 
like the Hydahs upon the coast, have been warlike 
and turbulent, such is not the reputation of those in 
the interior. It was the meat -eating Indian who 
made war a vocation and self-torture a dissipation. 
The fish-eating Indian kept out of his way. These 
short squat British Columbian natives are very dark- 
skinned, and have physiognomies so different from 
those of the Indians east of the Rockies that the 
study of their faces has tempted the ethnologists into 
-extraordinary guessing upon their origin, and into a 



256 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

contention which I prefer to avoid. It is not guess- 
ing to say that their high cheek-bones and flat faces 
make them reseijible the Chinese. That is true to 
such a degree that in walking the streets of Victoria, 
and meeting alternate Chinamen and Sivvash, it is 
not always easy to say which is which, unless one 
proceeds upon the assumption that if a man looks 
clean he is apt to be a Chinaman, whereas if he is 
dirty and ragged he is most likely to be a Si wash. 

You will find that seven in ten among the more 
intellisfent British Columbians conclude these Ind- 
ians to be of Japanese origin. The Japanese cur- 
rent is neighborly to the province, and it has drifted 
Japanese junks to these shores. When the first 
traders visited the neighborhood of the mouth of the 
Columbia they found beeswax in the sand near the 
vestio;es of a wreck, and it is said that one wreck of 
a junk was met with, and 12,000 pounds of this wax 
was found on her. Whalers are said to have fre- 
quently encountered wrecked and drifting junks in 
the eastern Pacific, and a local legend has it that in 
1834 remnants of a junk with three Japanese and a 
cargo of pottery were found on the coast south of 
Cape Flattery. Nothing less than all this should ex- 
cuse even a rudderless ethnologist for so cruel a re- 
flection upon the Japanese, for these Indians are so 
far from pretty that all who see them agree with Cap- 
tain Butler, the traveller, who wrote that " if they are 
of the Mongolian type, the sooner the Mongolians 
change their type the better." 

The coast Indians are splendid sailors, and their 
dugouts do not always come off second best in rac- 



CANADA S EL DORADO 



257 



ing with the boats of white men. With a primitive 
yet ingeniously made tool, like an adze, in the con- 
struction of which a blade is tied fast to a bent 
handle of bone, these natives laboriously pick out the 
heart of a great cedar log, and shape its outer sides 
into the form of a boat. When the log is properly 
hollowed, they fill it with water, and then drop in 
stones which they have heated in a fire. Thus they 
steam the boat so that they may spread the sides and 
fit in the crossbars which keep it strong and pre- 
serve its shape. These dugouts are 
sometimes sixty feet long, and are 
used for whaling and long voyages 
in rough seas. They are capable 
of carrying tons of the salmon or 
oolachan or herring, of which these 
people, who live as their fathers 
did, catch sufficient in a few days 
for their maintenance throughout 
a whole year. One gets an idea 
of the swarms of fish that infest 
those waters by the knowledge 
that before nets were used the her- 
ring and the oolachan, or candle- 
fish, were swept into these boats 
by an implement formed by stud- 
ding a ten-foot pole with spikes or 
nails. This was swept among the fish in the water, 
and the boats were speedily filled with the creatures 
that were impaled upon the spikes. Salmon, sea- 
otter, otter, beaver, marten, bear, and deer (or caribou 
or moose) were and still are the chief resources of 
17 




THE TSCIIUMMUM, OR 

TOOI, USED IN MAKING 

CANOES 



258 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

most of the Indians. Once they sold the fish and 
the peltry to the Hudson Bay Company, and ate 
what parts or surplus they did not sell. Now they 
work in the canneries or fish for them in summer, 
and hunt, trap, or loaf the rest of the time. However, 
while they still fish and sell furs, and while some are 
yet as their fathers were, nearly all the coast Indians 
are semi -civilized. They have at least the white 
man's clothes and hymns and vices. They have 
churches ; they live in houses ; they work in can- 
neries. What little there was that was picturesque 
about them has vanished only a few degrees faster 
than their own extinction as a pure race, and they 
are now a lot of longshoremen. What Mr. Duncan 
did for them in Metlakahtla — especially in housing 
the families separately — has not been arrived at even 
in the reservation at Victoria, where one may still 
see one of the huge, low, shed-like houses they prefer, 
ornamented with totem poles, and arranged for eight 
families, and consequently for a laxity of morals for 
which no one can hold the white man responsible. 

They are a tractable people, and take as kindly 
to the rudiments of civilization, to work, and to co- 
operation with the whites as the plains Indian does 
to tea, tobacco, and whiskey. They are physically 
but not mentally inferior to the plainsman. They 
carve bowls and spoons of stone and bone, and their 
heraldic totem poles are cleverly shapen, however 
grotesque they may be. They still make them, but 
they oftener carve little ones for white people, just as 
they make more silver bracelets for sale than for wear. 
They are clever at weaving rushes and cedar bark 



CANADA S EL DORADO 259 

into mats, baskets, floor-cloths, and cargo covers. In 
a word, they were more prone to work at the outset 
than most Indians, so that the present longshore ca- 
reer of most of them is not greatly to be wondered at. 
To any one who threads the vast silent forests of 
the interior, or journeys upon the trafficless water- 
ways, or, gun in hand, explores the mountains for 
game, the infrequency with which Indians are met 
becomes impressive. The province seems almost 
unpeopled. The reason is that the majority of the 
Indians were ever on the coast, where the water 
yielded food at all times and in plenty. The natives 
of the interior were not well fed or prosperous when 
the first white men found them, and since then small- 
pox, measles, vice, and starvation have thinned them 
terribly. Their graveyards are a feature of the scen- 
ery which all travellers in the province remember. 
From the railroad they may be seen along the Era- 
ser, each grave apparently having a shed built over 
it, and a cross rising from the earth beneath the shed. 
They had various burial customs, but a majority 
buried their dead in this way, with queerly-carved or 
painted sticks above them, where the cross now testi- 
fies to the work at the " missions." Some Indians 
marked a man's burial-place with his canoe and his 
gun; some still box their dead and leave the boxes 
on top of the earth, while others bury the boxes. 
Among the southern tribes a man's horse was often 
killed, and its skin decked the man's grave ; while in 
the far north it was the custom among the Stickeens 
to slaughter the personal attendants of a chief when 
he died. The Indians along the Skeena River ere- 



26o ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

mated their dead, and sometimes hung the ashes in 
boxes to the family totem pole. The Hydahs, the 
fierce natives of certain of the islands, have given up 
cremation, but they used to believe that if they did 
not burn a man's body their enemies would make 
charms from it. Polygamy flourished on the coast, 
and monogamy in the interior, but the contrast was 
due to the difference in the worldly wealth of the 
Indians. Wives had to be bought and fed, and the 
woodsmen could only afford one apiece. 

To return to their canoes, which most distinguish 
them. When a dugout is hollowed and steamed, a 
prow and stern are added of separate wood. The 
prow is always a work of art, and greatly beautifies 
the boat. It is in form like the breast, neck, and 
bill of a bird, but the head is intended to represent 
that of a savage animal, and is so painted. A mouth 
is cut into it, ears are carved on it, and eyes are 
painted on the sides ; bands of gay paint are put 
upon the neck, and the whole exterior of the boat is 
then painted red or black, with an ornamental line 
of another color along the edge or gunwale. The 
sailors sit upon the bottom of the boat, and propel 
it with paddles. Upon the water these swift vessels, 
with their fierce heads uplifted before their long, 
slender bodies, appear like great serpents or nonde- 
script marine monsters, yet they are pretty and 
graceful withal. While still holding aloof fiom the 
ethnologists' contention, I yet may add that a book- 
seller in Victoria came into the possession of a packet 
of photographs taken by an amateur traveller in the 
interior of China, and on my first visit to the prov- 



CANADA S EL DOKAUO 



261 



incc, nearly four 
years ago, I 
found, in look- 
ing through 
these views, sev- 
eral Chinese 
boats which 
were strangely 
and remarkably 
like the dug- 
outs of the pro- 
vincial Indians. 
They were too 
small in the 
pictures for it to 
be possible to 
decide whether 
they were built 
up or dug out, 
but in general 
they were of the 
same external 
appearance, and 
each one bore 
the upraised an- 
imal-head prow, shaped and painted like those I 
could see one block away from the bookseller's 
shop in Victoria. But such are not the canoes 
used by the Indians of the interior. From the 
Kootenay near our border to the Cassiar in the far 
north, a cigar-shaped canoe seems to be the general 
native vehicle. These are sometimes made of a 




""^ 



THE FIRST OF THE SALMON RUN, FRASEK 
RIVER 



262 ON Canada's frontier 

sort of scroll of bark, and sometimes they are dug- 
outs made of cotton-wood logs. They are narrower 
than either the cedar dugouts of the coast or the 
birch-bark canoes of our Indians, but they are roomy, 
and fit for the most dangerous and deft work in 
threading the rapids which everywhere cut up the 
navigation of the streams of the province into sepa- 
rated reaches. The Rev. Dr. Gordon, in his notes 
upon a journey in this province, likens these canoes 
to horse -troughs, but those I saw in the Kootenay 
country were of the shape of those cigars that are 
pointed at both ends. 

Whether these canoes are like any in Tartary or 
China or Japan, I do not know. My only quest for 
special information of that character proved disap- 
pointing. One man in a city of British Columbia is 
said to have studied such matters more deeply and 
to more purpose than all the others, but those who 
referred me to him cautioned me that he was eccen- 
tric. 

" You don't know where these Indians came from, 
eh ?" the savant replied to my first question. " Do 
you know how oyster-shells got on top of the Rocky 
Mountains } You don't, eh ? Well, I know a woman 
who went to a dentist's yesterday to have eighteen 
teeth pulled. Do you know why women prefer arti- 
ficial teeth to those which God has given them } 
You don't, eh 1 Why, man, you don't know any- 
thing." 

While we were — or he was — conversing, a labor- 
ing-man who carried a sickle came to the open door, 
and was asked what he wanted. 



Canada's el dorado 263 

" I wish to cut your thistles, sir," said he. 

" Thistles ?" said the savant, disturbed at the inter- 
ruption. " the thistles ! We are talking about 

Indians." 

Nevertheless, when the laborer had gone, he had 
left the subject of thistles uppermost in the savant's 
mind, and the conversation took so erratic a turn 
that it might well have been introduced hap-hazard 
into Tristram Shandy. 

" About thistles," said the savant, laying a gentle 
hand upon my knee. " Do you know that they are the 
Scotchmen's totems ? Many years ago a Scotchman, 
sundered from his native land, must needs set up his 
totem, a thistle, here in this country ; and now, sir, 
the thistle is such a curse that I am haled up twice a 
year and fined for having them in my yard." 

But nearly enough has been here said of the native 
population. Though the Indians boast dozens of 
tribal names, and almost every island on the coast 
and village in the interior seems the home of a sepa- 
rate tribe, they will be found much alike — dirty, 
greasy, sore -eyed, short -legged, and with their un- 
kempt hair cut squarely off, as if a pot had been up- 
turned over it to guide the operation. The British 
Columbians do not bother about their tribal divis- 
ions, but use the old traders' Chinook terms, and call 
every male a " siwash " and every woman a " klootch- 
man." 

Since the highest Canadian authority upon the 
subject predicts that the northern half of the Cordil- 
leran ranges will admit of as his^h a metalliferous de- 
velopment as that of the southern half in our Pacific 



264 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

States, it is important to review what has been done 
in mining, and what is thought of the future of that 
industry in the province. It may almost be said that 
the history of gold-mining there is the history of Brit- 
ish Columbia. Victoria, the capital, was a Hudson 
Bay post established in 1843, and Vancouver, Queen 
Charlotte's, and the other islands, as well as the main- 
land, were of interest to only a few white men as 
parts of a great fur-trading field with a small Indian 
population. The first nugget of gold was found at 
what is now called Gold Harbor, on the west coast 
of the Queen Charlotte Islands, by an Indian woman, 
in 185 1. A part of it, weighing four or five ounces, 
was taken by the Indians to Fort Simpson and sold. 
The Hudson Bay Company, which has done a little 
in every line of business in its day, sent a brigantine 
to the spot, and found a quartz vein traceable eighty 
feet, and yielding a high percentage of gold. Blast- 
ing was begun, and the vessel was loaded with ore ; 
but she was lost on the return voyage. An Ameri- 
can vessel, ashore at Esquimault, near Victoria, was 
purchased, renamed the Recovery, and sent to Gold 
Harbor with thirty miners, who worked the vein 
until the vessel was loaded and sent to England. 
News of the mine travelled, and in another year a 
small fleet of vessels came up from San Francisco; 
but the supply was seen to be very limited, and after 
$20,000 in all had been taken out, the field was 
abandoned. 

In 1855 gold was found by a Hudson Bay Com- 
pany's employe at Fort Colville, now in Washington 
State, near the boundary. Some Thompson River 



CANADA S EL DORADO 265 

(B. C.) Indians who went to Walla Walla spread a re- 
port there that gold, like that discovered at Colville, 
was to be found in the valley of the Thompson. A 
party of Canadians and half-breeds went to the region 
referred to, and found placers nine miles above the 
mouth of the river. By 1858 the news and the au- 
thentication of it stirred the miners of California, and 
an astonishing invasion of the virgin province began. 
It is said that in the spring of 1858 more than twenty 
thousand persons reached Victoria from San Fran- 
cisco by sea, distending the little fur -trading post 
of a few hundred inhabitants into what would even 
now be called a considerable city; a city of canvas, 
however. Simultaneously a third as many miners 
made their way to the new province on land. But 
the land was covered with mountains and dense 
forests, the only route to its interior for them was the 
violent, almost boiling, Fraser River, and there was 
nothing on which the lives of this horde of men could 
be sustained. By the end of the year out of nearly 
thirty thousand adventurers only a tenth part re- 
mained. Those who did stay worked the river bars of 
the lower Fraser until in five months they had shipped 
from Victoria more than half a million dollars' worth 
of gold. From a historical point of view it is a pe- 
culiar coincidence that in 1859, when the attention 
of the world was thus first attracted to this new 
country, the charter of the Hudson Bay Company ex- 
pired, and the territory passed from its control to be- 
come like any other crown colony. 

In i860 the gold-miners, seeking the source of the 
"flour" gold they found in such abundance in the bed 



266 



ON CANADA S FRONTIER 



of the river, pursued their search into the heart and 
almost the centre of that forbidding and unbroken ter- 
ritory. The Ouesnel River became the seat of their 
operations. Two years later came another extraordi- 
nary immigration. This was not surprising, for 1500 
miners had in one year (1861) taken out $2,000,000 




INDIAN SAI.MON-FISIIING IN THE THRASHER 



CANADA S EL DORADO 267 

in gold-dust from certain creeks in what is called the 
Cariboo District, and one can imagine (if one does 
not remember) what fabulous tales were based upon 
this fact. The second stampede was of persons from 
all over the world, but chiefly from England, Cana- 
da, Australia, and New Zealand. After that there 
were new "finds" almost every year, and the miners 
worked gradually northward until, about 1874, they 
had travelled through the province, in at one end 
and out at the other, and were working the tribu- 
taries of the Yukon River in the north, beyond the 
60th parallel. Mr. Dawson estimates that the total 
yield of gold between 1858 and 1888 was $54,108,804; 
the average number of miners employed each year 
was 2775, and the average earnings per man per 
year were $622. 

In his report, published by order of Parliament, Mr. 
Dawson says that while gold is so generally distrib- 
uted over the province that scarcely a stream of any 
importance fails to show at least "colors" of the 
metal, the principal discoveries clearly indicate that 
the most important mining districts are in the sys- 
tems of mountains and high plateaus lying to the 
south-west of the Rocky Mountains and parallel in 
direction with them. 

This mountain system next to and south-west of 
the Rockies is called, for convenience, the Gold 
Range, but it comprises a complex belt "of several 
more or less distinct and partly overlapping ranges " 
— the Purcell, Selkirk, and Columbia ranges in the 
south, and in the north the Cariboo, Omenica, and 
Cassiar ranges. "This series or system constitutes 



268 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

the most important metalliferous belt of the province. 
The richest gold fields are closely related to it, and 
discoveries of metalliferous lodes are reported in 
abundance from all parts of it which have been ex- 
plored. The deposits already made known are very 
varied in character, including highly argentiferous 
galenas and other silver ores and auriferous quartz 
veins." This same authority asserts that the Gold 
Range is continued by the Cabinet, Coeur d'Alene, 
and Bitter Root mountains in our country. While 
there is no single well-developed gold field as in Cali- 
fornia, the extent of territory of a character to occa- 
sion a hopeful search for gold is greater in the prov- 
ince than in California. The average man of business 
to whom visitors speak of the mining prospects of the 
province is apt to declare that all that has been lack- 
ing is the discovery of one grand mine and the en- 
listment of capital (from the United States, they gen- 
erally say) to work it. Mr. Dawson speaks to the 
same point, and incidentally accounts for the retarded 
development in his statement that one noteworthy 
difference between practically the entire area of the 
province and that of the Pacific States has been oc- 
casioned by the spread and movement of ice over the 
province during the glacial period. This produced 
changes in the distribution of surface materials and 
directions of drainage, concealed beneath "drifts "the 
indications to which prospectors farther south are used 
to trust, and by other means obscured the outcrops of 
veins which would otherwise be well marked. The 
dense woods, the broken navigation of the rivers, in 
detached reaches, the distance from the coast of the 



'ii/>/w/n///r ' '/'fviii. 






■i»n«Kr" 



»'lli«""i'lll|!'i||l!'!|lffl™ifl|||| 




/; 



/4'' 
'.ii 






1^\ 









CANADA S EL DORADO 27 1 

richest districts, and the cost of labor supplies and ma- 
chinery — all these are additional and weighty reasons 
for the slowness of development. But this was true of 
the past and is not of the present, at least so far as 
southern British Columbia is concerned. Railroads are 
reaching up into it from our country and down from 
the transcontinental Canadian Railway, and capital, 
both Canadian and American, is rapidly swelling an 
already heavy investment in many new and promising 
mines. Here it is silver- mininsr that is achievins: 
importance. 

Other ores are found in the province. The iron 
which has been located or worked is principally on 
the islands — Queen Charlotte, Vancouver, Texada, 
and the Walker group. Most of the ores are mag- 
netites, and that which alone has been worked — on 
Texada Island — is of excellent quality. The output 
of copper from the province is likely soon to become 
considerable. Masses of it have been found from 
time to time in various parts of the province — in the 
Vancouver series of islands, on the main-land coast, 
and in the interior. Its constant and rich association 
with silver shows lead to be abundant in the country, 
but it needs the development of transport facilities to 
give it value. Platinum is more likely to attain im- 
portance as a product in this than in any other part 
of North America. On the coast the granites are of 
such quality and occur in such abundance as to lead 
to the belief that their quarrying will one day be an 
important source of income, and there are marbles, 
sandstones, and ornamental stones of which the same 
may be said. 



J./Z 



ON CANADA S FRONTIER 



One of the most valuable products of the province 
is coal, the essential in which our Pacific coast States 
are the poorest. • The white man's attention was first 
attracted to this coal in 1835 by some Indians who 
brought lumps of it from Vancouver Island to the 
Hudson Bay post on the main-land, at Milbank Sound. 
The Beaver, the first steamship that stirred the waters 
of the Pacific, reached the province in 1836, and used 
coal that was found in outcroppings on the island 
beach. Thirteen years later the great trading com- 
pany brought out a Scotch coal-miner to look into 
the character and extent of the coal find, and he was 
followed by other miners and the necessary apparatus 
for prosecuting the inquiry. In the mean time the 
present chief source of supply at Nanaimo, seventy 
miles from Victoria and about opposite Vancouver, 
was discovered, and in 1852 mining was begun in 
earnest. From the very outset the chief market for 
the coal was found to be San Francisco. 

The original mines are now owned by the Van- 
couver Coal-mining and Land Company. Near them 
are the Wellington Mines, which began to be worked 
in 1 87 1. Both have continued in active operation 
from their foundation, and with a constantly and 
rapidly growing output. A third source of supply 
has very recently been established with local and 
American capital in what is called the Comox Dis- 
trict, back of Baynes Sound, farther north than 
Nanaimo, on the eastern side of Vancouver Island. 
These new works are called the Union Mines, and, if 
the predictions of my informants prove true, will pro- 
duce an output equal to that of the older Nanaimo 



Canada's el dorado 273 

collieries combined. In 1884 the coal shipped from 
Nanaimo amounted to 1000 tons for every day of the 
year, and in 1889 the total shipment had reached 
500,000 tons. As to the character of the coal, I quote 
again from Mr. Dawson's report on the minerals of 
British Columbia, published by the Dominion Govern- 
ment: 

" Rocks of cretaceous age are developed over a considerable area 
in British Columbia, often in very great thickness, and fuels occur in 
them in important quantity in at least two distinct stages, of which 
the lower and older includes the coal measures of the Queen Char- 
lotte Islands and those of Ouatsino Sound on Vancouver Island, with 
those of Crow Nest Pass in the Rocky Mountains ; the upper, the 
coal measures of Nanaimo and Comox, and probably also those of 
Suquash and other localities. The lower rocks hold both anthracite 
and bituminous coal in the Queen Charlotte Islands, but elsewhere 
contain bituminous coal only. The upper have so far been found to 
yield bituminous coal only. The fuels of the tertiary rocks are, gen- 
erally speaking, lignites, but include also various fuels intermediate 
between these and true coals, which in a few places become true 
bituminous coals." 

It is thought to be more than likely that the Co- 
mox District may prove far more productive than the 
Nanaimo region. It is estimated that productive 
measures underlie at least 300 square miles in the 
Comox District, exclusive of what may extend beyond 
the shore. The Nanaimo area is estimated at 200 
square miles, and the product is no better than, if it 
equals, that of the Comox District. 

Specimens of good coal have been found on the 
main-land in the region of the upper Skeena River, 
on the British Columbia water-shed of the Rockies 
near Crow Nest Pass, and in the country adjacent to 
the Peace River in the eastern part of the province. 

18 



274 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

Anthracite which compares favorably with that of 
Pennsylvania has been found at Cowgitz, Queen 
Charlotte Islands. In 187 1 a mining company began 
work upon this coal, but abandoned it, owing to diffi- 
culties that were encountered. It is now believed 
that these miners did not prove the product to be of 
an unprofitable character, and that farther explora- 
tion is fully justified by what is known of the field. 
Of inferior forms of coal there is every indication of 
an abundance on the main-land of the province. " The 
tertiary or Laramie coal measures of Puget Sound 
"^and Bellingham Bay" (in the United States) "are con- 
tinuous north of the international boundary, and must 
underlie nearly 18,000 square miles of the low coun- 
try about the estuary of the Fraser and in the lower 
part of its valley." It is quite possible, since the 
better coals of Nanaimo and Comox are in demand 
in the San Francisco market, even at their high price 
and with the duty added, that these lignite fields may 
be worked for local consumption. 

Already the value of the fish caught in the British 
Columbian waters is estimated at $5,000,000 a year, 
and yet the industry is rather at its birth than in its 
infancy. All the waters in and near the province 
fairly swarm with fish. The rivers teem with them, 
the straits and fiords and gulfs abound with them, 
the ocean beyond is freighted with an incalculable 
weieht of livins food, which must soon be distributed 
among the homes of the civilized world. The prin- 
cipal varieties of fish are the salmon, cod, shad, white- 
fish, bass, flounder, skate, sole, halibut, sturgeon, 
oolachan, herring, trout, haddock, smelts, anchovies. 




■^. 



■J'^UI. f.l'.iW/i.- 



THE SALMON CACHE 



dog-fish, perch, sardines, oysters, crayfish shrimps, 
crabs, and mussels. Of other denizens of the water, 
the whale, sea-otter, and seal prove rich prey for those 
who search for them. 

The main salmon rivers are the Fraser, Skeena, 
and Nasse rivers, but the fish also swarm in the inlets 
into which smaller streams empty. The Nimkish, 



276 ON Canada's frontier 

on Vancouver Island, is also a salmon stream. Setting 
aside the stories of water so thick with salmon that 
a man might walk upon their backs, as well as that 
tale of the stage-coach which was upset by salmon 
banking themselves against it when it was crossing a 
fording-place, there still exist absolutely trustworthy 
accounts of swarms which at their height cause the 
larofest rivers to seem alive with these fish. In such 
cases the ripple of their back fins frets the entire 
surface of the stream. I have seen photographs that 
show the fish in incredible numbers, side by side, like 
logs in a raft, and I have the word of a responsible 
man for the statement that he has gotten all the 
salmon needed for a small camp, day after day, by 
walking to the edge of a river and jerking the fish 
out with a common poker. 

There are about sixteen canneries on the Fraser, 
six on the Skeena, three on the Nasse, and three 
scattered in other waters — River Inlet and Alert Bay. 
The total canning in 1889 was 414,294 cases, each 
of 48 one-pound tins. The fish are sold to Europe, 
Australia, and eastern Canada. The American market 
takes the Columbia River salmon. A round $1,000,000 
is invested in the vessels, nets, trawls, canneries, oil- 
factories, and freezing and salting stations used in 
this industry in British Columbia, and about 5500 men 
are employed. " There is no difficulty in catching 
the fish," says a local historian, "for in some streams 
they are so crowded that they can readily be picked 
out of the water by hand." However, gill-nets are 
found to be preferable, and the fish are caught in 
these, which are stretched across the streams, and 



CANADA S EL DORADO 277 

handled by men in flat-bottomed boats. The fish are 
loaded into scows and transported to the canneries, 
usually frame structures built upon piles close to the 
shores of the rivers. In the canneries the tins are 
made, and, as a rule, saw-mills near by produce the 
wood for the manufacture of the packing-cases. The 
fish are cleaned, rid of their heads and tails, and then 
chopped up and loaded into the tins by Chinamen 
and Indian w^omen. The tins are then boiled, solder- 
ed, tested, packed, and shipped away. The industry 
is rapidly extending, and fresh salmon are now being 
shipped, frozen, to the markets of eastern America 
and England. My figures for 1889 (obtained from 
the Victoria Times) are in all likelihood under the 
mark for the season of 1890. The coast is made rag- 
ged by inlets, and into nearly every one a water- 
course empties. All the larger streams are the haven 
of salmon in the spawning season, and in time the 
principal ones will be the bases of canning operations. 
The Dominion Government has founded a salmon 
hatchery on the Fraser, above New Westminster. It 
is under the supervision of Thomas Mowat, Inspector 
of Fisheries, and millions of small fry are now annu- 
ally turned into the great river. Whether the unex- 
ampled run of 1889 was in any part due to this proc- 
ess cannot be said, but certainly the salmon are not 
diminishing in numbers. It was feared that the ref- 
use from the canneries would injure the " runs" of 
live fish, but it is now believed that there is a profit 
to be derived from treating the refuse for oil and 
guano, so that it is more likely to be saved than 
thrown back into the streams in the near future. 



2/8 ON Canada's frontier 

The oolachan, or candle-fish, is a valuable product 
of these waters, chiefly of the Fraser and Nasse 
rivers. They are said to be delicious when fresh, 
smoked, or salted, and I have it on the authority of 
the little pamphlet " British Columbia," handed me 
by a government official, that " their oil is considered 
superior to cod-liver oil, or any other fish-oil known."" 
It is said that this oil is whitish, and of the con- 
sistency of thin lard. It is used as food by the na- 
tives, and is an article of barter between the coast 
Indians and the tribes of the interior. There is so 
much of it in a candle-fish of ordinary size that when> 
one of them is dried, it will burn like a candle. It 
is the custom of the natives on the coast to catch 
the fish in immense numbers in purse-nets. They 
then boil them in iron -bottomed bins, straining the 
product in willow baskets, and running the oil into 
cedar boxes holding fifteen gallons each. The Nasse 
River candle -fish are the best. Thev beo^in runninaf 
in March, and continue to come by the million for a 
period of several weeks. 

Codfish are supposed to be very plentiful, and to 
frequent extensive banks at sea, but these shoals have 
not been explored or charted by the Government,, 
and private enterprise will not attempt the work. 
Similar banks off the Alaska coast are already the 
resorts of California fishermen, who drive a prosper- 
ous trade in salting large catches there. The skil, or 
black cod, formerly known as the "coal-fish," is a 
splendid deep-water product. These cod weigh from 
eight to twenty pounds, and used to be caught by 
the Indians with hook and line. Already white men 



CANADA S EL DORADO 279 

are driving the Indians out by superior methods. 
Trawls of 300 hooks are used, and the fish are found 
to be plentiful, especially off the west coast of the 
Queen Charlotte Islands. The fish is described as 
superior to the cod of Newfoundland in both oil and 
meat. The general market is not yet accustomed to 
it, but such a ready sale is found for what are caught 
that the number of vessels engaged in this fishing in- 
creases year by year. It is evident that the catch of 
skil will soon be an important source of revenue to 
the province. 




AN lUEAL OK THE COAST 



Herring are said to be plentiful, but no fleet is yet 
fitted out for them. Halibut are numerous and com- 
mon. They are often of very great size. Sturgeon 
are found in the Fraser, whither they chase the sal- 
mon. One weighing 1400 pounds was exhibited in 
Victoria a few years ago, and those that weigh more 
than half as much are not unfrequently captured. 
The following is a report of the yield and value of 
the fisheries of the province for 1889: 



28o 



ON CANADA S FRONTIER 



Kind of Fish. 



Salmon in cans . ._ lbs 

fresh . . .' lbs 

salted bbls 

" smoked lbs 

Sturgeon, fresh 

Halibut. " 

Herring, " 

" smoked 

Oolachans, " 

fresh 

salted bbls, 

Trout, fresh lbs. 

Fish, assorted 

Smelts, fresh 

Rock cod 

Skil, salted bbls. 

Fooshqua, fresh 

Fur seal-skins No. 

Hair " " 

Sea-otter skins " 

Fish oil gals. 

Oysters sacks 

Clams 

Mussels 

Crabs No. 

Abelones boxes 

Isinglass lbs. 

Estimated fish consumed in prov- 
ince 

Shrimps, prawns, etc 

Estimated consumption by Ind- 
ians — 

Salmon 

Halibut 

Sturgeon and other fish . . 
Fish oils 



Quantity. 



Value. 



20,I2'2,I2S 
2,187.000 

3.749 

12,900 

318.600 

605.050 

1 90,000 

33,000 

82.500 

6,700 

380 

14,025 

322.725 

52,100 

39.250 

1.560 

268.350 

33.570 

7.000 

115 

141,420 

3.000 

3,500 

250 

175,000 

100 

5,000 



Approximate yield , 



M.414.655 36 
218.700 00 

37,460 00 
2,580 00 

15,930 00 

30,152 50 
9,500 00 
3,300 00 
8,250 00 
1,340 00 
3.800 00 
1,402 50 

16,136 25 
3,126 00 
1,962 50 

18,720 00 

13.417 50 

335.700 00 

5,250 00 

1 1 , 500 00 

70,710 00 

5,250 00 

6,125 00 

500 00 

5,250 00 

500 00 

1,750 00 

100,000 00 
5,000 00 



2,732,500 00 

190,000 00 

260.000 00 

75.000 00 



3,605,467 61 



When it is considered that this is the showing of 
one of the newest communities on the continent, 
numbering only the population of what we would 
call a small city, suffering for want of capital and 
nearly all that capital brings with it, there is no 



CANADA S EL DORADO 28 1 

longer occasion for surprise at the provincial boast 
that they possess far more extensive and richer fish- 
ing-fields than any on the Atlantic coast. Time and 
enterprise will surely test this assertion, but it is al- 
ready evident that there is a vast revenue to be 
wrested from those waters. 

I have not spoken of the sealing, which yielded 
$236,000 in 1 88 7, and may yet be decided to be ex- 
clusively an American and not a British Columbian 
source of profit. Nor have I touched upon the ex- 
traction of oil from herrings and from dog-fish and 
whales, all of which are small channels of revenue. 

I enjoyed the good-fortune to talk at length with a 
civil engineer of high repute who has explored the 
greater part of southern British Columbia — at least 
in so far as its main valleys, waterways, trails, and 
mountain passes are concerned. Having learned not 
to place too high a value upon the printed matter 
put forth in praise of any new country, I was espe- 
cially pleased to obtain this man s practical impres- 
sions concerning the store and quality and kinds of 
timber the province contains. He said, not to use 
his own words, that timber is found all the way back 
from the coast to the Rockies, but it is in its most 
plentiful and majestic forms on the west slope of 
those mountains and on the west slope of the Coast 
Range. The very largest trees are between the 
Coast Range and the coast. The country between 
the Rocky Mountains and the Coast Range is dry by 
comparison with the parts where the timber thrives 
best, and, naturally, the forests are inferior. Between 
the Rockies and the Kootenay River cedar and tarn- 



282 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

aracks reach six and eight feet in diameter, and at- 
tain a height of 200 feet not infrequently. There 
are two or three kinds of fir and some pines (though 
not very many) in this region. There is very Httle 
leaf-wood, and no hard-wood. Maples are found, to 
be sure, but they are rather more like bushes than 
trees to the British Columbian mind. As one moves 
westward the same timber prevails, but it grows 
shorter and smaller until the low coast country is 
reached. There, as has been said, the giant forests 
occur again. This coast region is largely a flat 
country, but there are not many miles of it. 

To this rule, as here laid down, there are some not- 
able exceptions. One particular tree, called there 
the bull-pine — it is the pine of Lake Superior and 
the East — grows to great size all over the province. 
It is a common thing to find the trunks of these 
trees measuring four feet in diameter, or nearly thir- 
teen feet in circumference. It is not especially valu- 
able for timber, because it is too sappy. It is short- 
lived when exposed to the weather, and is therefore 
not in demand for railroad work; but for the ordinary 
uses to which builders put timber it answers very 
well. 

There is a maple which attains great size at the 
coast, and which, when dressed, closely resembles 
bird's-eye-maple. It is called locally the vine -maple. 
The trees are found with a diameter of two -and -a 
half to three feet, but the trunks seldom rise above 
forty or fifty feet. The wood is crooked. It runs 
very badly. This, of course, is what gives it the 
beautiful grain it possesses, and which must, sooner 



m\\ «v 




CANADA S EL DORADO 285 

or later, find a ready market for it. There is plenty 
of hemlock in the province, but it is nothing like so 
large as that which is found in the East, and its bark 
is not so thick. Its size renders it serviceable for 
nothing larger than railway ties, and the trees grow 
in such inaccessible places, half-way up the mount- 
ains, that it is for the most part unprofitable to 
handle it. The red cedars — the wood of which is con- 
sumed in the manufacture of pencils and cigar-boxes 
— are also small. On the other hand, the white cedar 
reaches enormous sizes, up to fifteen feet of thick- 
ness at the base, very often. It is not at all extraor- 
dinary to find these cedars reaching 200 feet above 
the ground, and one was cut at Port Moody, in clear- 
ing the way for the railroad, that had a length of 310 
feet. When fire rages in the provincial forests, the 
wood of these trees is what is consumed, and usually 
the trunks, hollow and empty, stand grimly in their 
places after the fire would otherwise have been for- 
gotten. These great tubes are often of such dimen- 
sions that men put windows and doors in them and 
use them for dwellings. In the valleys are immense 
numbers of poplars of the common and cottonwood 
species, white birch, alder, willow, and yew trees, but 
they are not estimated in the forest wealth of the 
province, because of the expense that marketing 
them would entail. 

This fact concerning the small timber indicates at 
once the primitive character of the country, and the 
vast wealth it possesses in what might be called heroic 
timber — that is, sufficiently valuable to force its way 
to market even from out that unopened wilderness.. 



286 ON Canada's frontier 

It was the opinion of the engineer to whom I have 
referred that timber land which does not attract the 
second glance of. a prospector in British Columbia 
would be considered of the first importance in Maine 
and New Brunswick. To put it in another wa}^ river- 
side timber land which in those countries would fetch 
fifty dollars the acre solely for its wood, in British 
Columbia would not be taken up. In time it may 
be cut, undoubtedly it must be, when new railroads 
alter its value, and therefore it is impossible even 
roughly to estimate the value of the provincial forests. 
A great business is carried on in the shipment of 
ninety-foot and one-hundred-foot Douglas fir sticks to 
the great car-building works of our country and Can- 
ada. They are used in the massive bottom frames of 
palace cars. The only limit that has yet been reach- 
ed in this industry is not in the size of the logs, but 
in the capacities of the saw-mills, and in the possibil- 
ities of transportation by rail, for these logs require 
three cars to support their length. Except for the val- 
leys, the whole vast country is enormously rich in this 
timber, the mountains (excepting the Rockies) being 
clothed with it from their bases to their tops. Vancou- 
ver Island is a heavily and valuably timbered country. 
It bears the same trees as the main-land, except that it 
has the oak-tree, and does not possess the tamarack. 
The Vancouver Island oaks do not exceed two or 
two -and -a- half feet in diameter. The Douglas fir 
(our Oregon pine) grows to tremendous proportions, 
especially on the north end of the island. In the old 
offices of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Vancouver 
are panels of this wood that are thirteen feet across, 



CANADA S EL DORADO 287 

showing that they came from a tree whose trunk was 
forty feet in circumference. Tens of thousands of 
these firs are from eight to ten feet in diameter at the 
bottom. 

Other trees of the province are the great silver-fir, 
the wood of which is not very valuable; Englemann's 
spruce, which is very like white spruce, and is very 
abundant ; balsam-spruce, often exceeding two feet in 
diameter; the yellow or pitch pine; white pine; yellow 
cypress; crab -apple, occurring as a small tree or 
shrub; western birch, comojon in the Columbia re- 
gion ; paper or canoe birch, found sparingly on Van- 
couver Island and on the lower Fraser, but in abun- 
dance and of large size in the Peace River and upper 
Fraser regions ; dogwood, arbutus, and several minor 
trees. Among the shrubs which grow in abundance 
in various districts or all over the province are the 
following : hazel, red elder, willow, barberry, wild red 
cherry, blackberry, yellow plum, choke-cherry, rasp- 
berry, gooseberr3^ bearberry, currant, and snowberry, 
mooseberry, bilberry, cranberry, whortleberry, mul- 
berry, and blueberry. 

I would have liked to write at lenorth concerning 
the enterprising cities of the province, but, after all, 
they may be trusted to make themselves known. It 
is the region behind them which most interests 
mankind, and the Government has begun, none too 
promptly, a series of expeditions for exploiting it. As 
for the cities, the chief among them and the capital, Vic- 
toria, has an estimated population of 22,000. Its busi- 
ness district wears a prosperous, solid, and attractive 
appearance, and its detached dwellings — all of frame, 



288 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

and of the distinctive type which marks the houses of 
the CaHfornia towns — are surrounded by gardens. It 
has a beautiful but inadequate harbor; yet in a few 
years it will have spread to Esquimault, now less than 
two miles distant. This is now the seat of a British 
admiralty station, and has a splendid haven, whose 
water is of a depth of from six to eight fathoms. At 
Esquimault are governme nt offices, churches, schools,, 
hotels, stores, a naval " canteen," and a dry-dock 450- 
feet long, 26 feet deep, and 65 feet wide at its en- 
trance. The electric street railroad of Victoria was 
extended to Esquimault in the autumn of 1890. Of 
the climate of Victoria Lord Lome said, " It is softer 
and more constant than that of the south of Eng- 
land." 

Vancouver, the principal city of the main-land, is 
slightly smaller than Victoria, but did not begin ta 
displace the forest until 1886. After that every 
house except one was destroyed by fire. To-day it 
boasts a hotel comparable in most important respects 
with any in Canada, many noble business buildings 
of brick or stone, good schools, fine churches, a really 
great area of streets built up with dwellings, and a 
notable system of wharves, warehouses, etc. The 
Canadian Pacific Railway terminates here, and so- 
does the line of steamers for China and Japan. The 
city is picturesquely and healthfully situated on an 
arm of Burrard Inlet, has gas, water, electric lights,, 
and shows no sign of halting its hitherto rapid growth. 
Of New Westminster, Nanaimo, Yale, and the still 
smaller towns, there is not opportunity here for more 
than naming. 



Canada's el dorado 289 

In the original settlements in that territory a pecul- 
iar institution occasioned gala times for the red men 
now and then. This was the "potlatch," a thing to 
us so foreign, even in the impulse of which it is be- 
gotten, that we have no word or phrase to give its 
meaning. It is a feast and merrymaking at the ex- 
pense of some man who has earned or saved what he 
deems considerable w-ealth, and who desires to dis- 
tribute every iota of it at once in edibles and drink- 
ables among the people of his tribe or village. He 
does this because he aspires to a chieftainship, or 
merely for the credit of a "potlatch " — a high distinc- 
tion. Indians have been known to throw away such 
a sum of money that their "potlatch" has been given 
in a huge shed built for the feast, that hundreds have 
been both fed and made drunk, and that blankets and 
ornaments have been distributed in addition to the 
feast. 

The custom has a new sio-nificance now. It is the 
w'hite man who is to enjoy a greater than all previous 
potlatches in that region. The treasure has been 
garnered during the ages by time or nature or what- 
soever you may call the host, and the province itself 
is offered as the feast. 

19 



IX 

DAN Dunn's outfit 

AT Revelstoke, 380 miles from the Pacific Ocean, 
in British Columbia, a small white steamboat, 
built on the spot, and exposing a single great paddle- 
wheel at her stern, was waiting to make another of her 
still few trips through a wilderness that, but for her 
presence, would be as completely primitive as almost 
any in North America. Her route lay down the 
Columbia River a distance of about one hundred 
and thirty miles to a point called Sproat's Landing, 
where some rapids interrupt navigation. The main 
load upon the steamer s deck was of steel rails for a 
railroad that was building into a new mining region 
in what is called the Kootenay District, just north of 
our Washinorton and Idaho. The sister ranije to the 
Rockies, called the Selkirks, was to be crossed by the 
new highway, which would then connect the valley of 
the Columbia with the Kootenay River. There was 
a temptation beyond the mere chance to join the first 
throng that pushed open a gateway and began the 
breaking of a trail in a brand-new country. There 
was to be witnessed the propulsion of civilization be- 
yond old confines by steam-power, and this required 
railroad building in the Rockies, where that science 
finds its most formidable problems. And around and 
through all that was being done pressed a new popu- 



DAN DUNN S OUTFIT 



291 



lation, made up of many of the elements that pro- 
duced our old-time border life, and gave birth to some 
of the most picturesque and exciting chapters in 
American History. 

It should be understood that here in the very heart 
of British Columbia only the watercourses have been 
travelled, and there was neither a settlement nor a 
house along the Columbia in that great reach of its 
valley between our border and the Canadian Pacific 
Railway, except at the landing at which this boat 
stopped. 

Over all the varying scene, as the boat ploughed 
along, hung a mighty silence ; for almost the only life 
on the deep wooded sides of the mountains was that 
of stealthy game. At only two points were any human 
beings lodged, and these were wood-choppers who 
supplied the fuel for the steamer — a Chinaman in one 
place, and two or three white men farther on. In this 
part of its magnificent valley the Columbia broadens 
in two long loops, called the Arrow Lakes, each more 
than two miles wide and twenty to thirty miles in 
length. Their prodigious towering walls are densely 
wooded, and in places are snow-capped in midsummer. 
The forest growth is primeval, and its own luxuriance 
crowds it beyond the edge of the grand stream in the 
fretwork of fallen trunks and bushes, whose roots are 
bedded in the soft mass of centuries of forest debris. 

Early in the journey the clerk of the steamer told 
me that wild animals were frequently seen crossing 
the river ahead of the vessel; bear, he said, and deer 
and elk and porcupine. When I left him to go to 
my state-room and dress for the rough journey ahead 



292 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

of me, he came to my door, calling in excited tones for 
me to come out on the deck. " There's a big bear 
ahead !" he cried, and as he spoke I saw the black 
head of the animal cleaving the quiet water close to 
the nearer shore. Presently Bruin's feet touched the 
bottom, and he bounded into the bush and disap- 
peared. 

The scenery was superb all the day, but at sundown 
nature began to revel in a series of the most splendid 
and spectacular effects. For an hour a haze had 
clothed the more distant mountains as with a trans- 
parent veil, rendering the view dream-like and soft 
beyond description. But as the sun sank to the sum- 
mit of the uplifted horizon it began to lavish the most 
intense colors upon all the objects in view. The snowy 
peaks turned to gaudy prisms as of crystal, the wood- 
ed summits became impurpled, the nearer hills turned 
a deep green, and the tranquil lake assumed a bright 
pea -color. Above all else, the sky was gorgeous. 
Around its western edge it took on a rose-red blush 
that blended at the zenith with a deep blue, in which 
were floating little clouds of amber and of flame- lit 
pearl. 

A moonless night soon closed around the boat, and 
in the morning we were at Sproat's Landing, a place 
two months old. The village consisted of a tiny clus- 
ter of frame-houses and tents perched on the edge 
of the steep bank of the Columbia. One building was 
the office and storehouse of the projected railroad, 
two others were general trading stores, one was the 
hotel, and the other habitations were mainly tents. 

I firmly believe there never was a hotel like the 



DAN nUNN S OUTFIT 



293 



hostlery there. In a general way its design was an 
adaptation of the plan of a hen-coop. Possibly a box 
made of gridirons suggests more clearly the principle 
of its construction. It was two stories high, and con- 
tained about a baker's dozen of rooms, the main one 
beino^ the bar-room, of course. After the framework 




AN INDIAN CANOE ON THE COLUMBIA 



had been finished, there was perhaps half enough 
"slab" lumber to sheathe the outside of the house, 
and this had been made to serve for exterior and in- 
terior walls, and the floors and ceilings besides. The 
consequence was that a flock of gigantic canaries 
might have been kept in it with propriety, but as a 
place of abode for human beings it compared closely 
with the Brooklyn Bridge. 

They have in our West many very frail hotels that 
the people call "telephone houses," because a tenant 
can hear in every room whatever is spoken in any 



294 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

part of the building; but in this house one could 
stand in any room and see into all the others. A 
clergyman and bis wife stopped in it on the night 
before I arrived, and the good woman stayed up until 
nearly daylight, pinning papers on the walls and lay- 
ing them on the floor until she covered a corner in 
which to prepare for bed. 

I hired a room and stored my traps in it, but I 
slept in one of the engineers' tents, and met with a 
very comical adventure. The tent contained two 
cots, and a bench on which the engineer, who occu- 
pied one of the beds, had heaped his clothing. Sup- 
posing him to be asleep, I undressed quietly, blew out 
the candle, and popped into my bed. As I did so one 
pair of its legs broke down, and it naturally occurred 
to me, at almost the same instant, that the bench 
was of about the proper height to raise the fallen end 
of the cot to the right level. 

" Broke down, eh .?" said my companion — a man, 
by-the-way, whose face I have never yet seen. 

" Yes," I replied. " Can I put your clothing on the 
floor and make use of that bench ?" 

" Aye, that you can." 

So out of bed I leaped, put his apparel in a heap 
on the floor, and ran the bench under my bed. It 
proved to be a neat substitute for the broken legs, 
and I was quickly under the covers again and ready 
for sleep. 

The engineer's voice roused me. 

" That's what I call the beauty of a head-piece," he 
said. Presently he repeated the remark. 

" Are you speaking to me.''" I asked. 



DAN DUNN S OUTFIT 295 

" Yes; I'm saying that's what I call the beauty of a 
head-piece. It's wonderful; and many's the day and 
night I'll think of it, if I live. What do I mean ? Why, 
I mean that that is what makes you Americans such 
a great people — it's the beauty of having head-pieces 
on your shoulders. It's so easy to think quick if 
you've got something to think with. Here you are, 
and your bed breaks down. What would I do ? 
Probably nothing. I'd think what a beastly scrape 
it was, and I'd keep on thinking till I went to sleep. 
What do you do ? Why, as quick as a flash you says, 
' Hello, here's a go !' ' May I have the bench .?' says 
you. ' Yes,' says I. Out of bed you go, and you 
clap the bench under the bed, and there you are, as 
right as a trivet. That's the beauty of a head-piece, 
and that's what makes America the wonderful coun- 
try she is." 

Never was a more sincere compliment paid to my 
country, and I am glad I obtained it so easily. 

There was a barber pole in front of the house, set 
up by a " prospector " who had run out of funds (and 
everything else except hope), and who, like all his 
kind, had stopped to " make a few dollars " wherewith 
to outfit as^ain and continue his search for ijold. He 
noted the local need of a barber, and instantly be- 
came one by purchasing a razor on credit, and paint- 
ing a pole while waiting for custom. He was a jocu- 
lar fellow — a born New Yorker, by-the-way. 

" Don't shave me close," said I. 

"Close.'*" he repeated. "You'll be the luckiest 
victim I've slashed yet if I get off any of your beard 
at all. How's the razor?" 



296 ON Canada's frontier 

"All right." 

" Oh no, it ain't," said he ; " you're setting your 
nerves to stand it, so's not to be called a tender-foot. 
I'm no barber. I expected to 'tend bar when I 
bumped up agin this place. If you could see the 
blood streaming down your face you'd faint." 

In spite of his self -depreciation, he performed as 
artistic and painless an operation as I ever sat 
through. 

While I was being shaved the loungers in the 
barber-shop entered into a conversation that re- 
vealed, as nothing else could have disclosed it, the 
deadly monotony of life in that little town. A hen 
cackled out-of-doors, and the loungers fell to ques- 
tioning one another as to which hen had laid an egg. 

" It must be the black one," said the barber. 

" Yet it don't exactly sound like old blacky 's 
cackle," said a more deliberate and careful speaker, 

" 'Pears to me 's though it might be the speckled 
un," ventured a third. 

"She ain't never laid no eggs," said the barber. 

" Could it be the bantam ?" another inquired. 

Thus they discussed with earnestness this most in- 
teresting event of the morning, until a young man 
darted into the room with his eyes lighted by excite- 
ment. 

" Say, Bill," said he, almost breathlessly, " that's 
the speckled hen a-cackling, by thunder ! She's laid 
an egg, I guess." 

In Sproat's Landing we saw the nucleus of a rail- 
road terminal point. The queer hotel was but little 
more peculiar than many of the people who gathered 



i(*J4@i?^^»?^^ 




C ..j_ * A^i) 



,«««4 ' r^ -^ /^t^^ 



"you're setting your nerves to stand it" 



on the single street on pay-day to spend their hard- 
earned money upon a great deal of illicit whiskey and 
a few rude necessaries from the limited stock on sale 
in the stores. There never had been any grave dis- 
order there, yet the floating population was as motley 
a collection of the riffraff of the border as one could 
well imagine, and there was only one policeman to 



298 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

enforce the law in a territory the size of Rhode Isl- 
and. He was quite as remarkable in his way as any 
other development of that embryotic civilization. His 
name was Jack Kirkup, and all who knew him spoke 
of him as being physically the most superb example 
of manhood in the Dominion. Six feet and three 
inches in height, with the chest, neck, and limbs of a 
giant, his three hundred pounds of weight were so 
exactly his complement as to give him the symmetry 
of an Apollo. He was good-looking, with the beauty 
of a round-faced, good-natured boy, and his thick hair 
fell in a cluster of ringlets over his forehead and upon 
his neck. No knight of Arthur's circle can have 
been more picturesque a figure in the forest than this 
" Jack." He was as neat as a dandy. He wore high 
boots and corduroy knickerbockers, a flannel shirt 
and a sack-coat, and rode his big bay horse with the 
ease and sfrace of a Skobeleff. He smoked like a fire 
of green brush, but had never tasted liquor in his life. 
In a dozen years he had slept more frequently in the 
open air, upon pebble beds or in trenches in the snow, 
than upon ordinary bedding, and he exhibited, in his 
graceful movements, his sparkling eyes and ruddy 
cheeks, his massive frame and his imperturbable good- 
nature, a degree of health and vigor that would seem 
insolent to the average New Yorker. Now that the 
railroad was building, he kept ever on the trail, along 
what was called " the right of way" — going from camp 
to camp to "jump" whiskey peddlers and gamblers 
and to quell disorder — except on pay-day, once a 
month, when he stayed at Sproat's Landing. 

The echoes of his fearless behavior and lively ad- 



DAN DUiNN S OUTFIT 



299 



ventures rang in every gathering. Ti\e general tenor 
of the stories was to the effect that he usually gave 
one warning to evil-doers, and if they did not heed 
that he " cleaned them out." He carried a revolver, 
but never had used it. Even when the most notori- 
ous gambler on our border had crossed over into 
" Jack's " bailiwick the policeman depended upon his 
fists. He had met the gambler and had " advised" 
him to take the cars next day. The gambler, in re- 




V^«*NT. 



' *"W W 



.{«*,(,. 



^'4i 



JACK KIRKUP, THE MOUNTAIN SHERIFK 



300 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

ply, had suggested that both would get along more 
quietly if each minded his own affairs, whereupon 
Kirkup had said, " You hear me : take the cars out 
of here to-morrow." The little community (it was 
Donald, B. C, a very rough place at the time) held 
its breathing for twenty- four hours, and at the ap- 
proach of train -time was on tiptoe with strained 
anxiety. At twenty minutes before the hour the 
policeman, amiable and easy-going as ever in appear- 
ance, began a tour of the houses. It was in a tavern 
that he found the gambler. 

" You must take the train," said he. 

" You can't make me," replied the gambler. 

There were no more words. In two minutes the 
giant was carrying the limp body of the ruffian to a 
wagon, in which he drove him to the jail. There he 
washed the blood off the gambler's face and tidied 
his collar and scarf. From there the couple walked 
to the cars, where they parted amicably. 

" I had to be a little rough," said Kirkup to the 
loungers at the station, " because he was armed like 
a pin-cushion, and I didn't want to have to kill him." 

We made the journey from Sproat's Landing to 
the Kootenay River upon a sorry quartet of pack- 
horses that were at other times employed to carry 
provisions and material to the construction camps. 
They were of the kind of horses known all over the 
West as " cayuses." The word is the name of a once 
notable tribe of Indians in what is now the State of 
Washington. To these Indians is credited the intro- 
duction of this small and peculiar breed of horses, 
but many persons in the West think the horses get 



DAN DUNNS OUTFIT 3OI 

the nickname because of a humorous fancy begotten 
of their \vildness, and suggesting that they are only 
part horses and part coyotes. But all the wildness 
and the characteristic " bucking" had long since been 
" packed " out of these poor creatures, and they 
needed the whip frequently to urge them upon a slow- 
progress. Kirkup was going his rounds, and accom- 
panied us on our journey of less than twenty miles to 
the Kootenay River. On the way one saw every 
stage in the construction of a railway. The process 
of development was reversed as we travelled, because 
the work had been pushed well along where we start- 
ed, and was but at its commencement where we ended 
our trip. At the landing half a mile or more of the 
railroad had been completed, even to the addition of 
a locomotive and two gondola cars. Beyond the 
little strip of rails was a long reach of graded road- 
bed, and so the progress of the work dwindled, until 
at last there was little more than the trail -cutters' 
path to mark what had been determined as the "right 
of way." 

For the sake of clearness, I will first explain the 
steps that are taken at the outset in building a rail- 
road, rather than tell what parts of the undertaking 
we came upon in passing over the various " con- 
tracts " that were being worked in what appeared a 
confusing and hap-hazard disorder. I have mentioned 
that one of the houses at the landing was the railroad 
company's storehouse, and that near by were the 
tents of the surveyors or civil engineers. The road 
was to be a branch of the Canadian Pacific system, 
and these enorineers were the first men sent into the 



302 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

country, with instructions to survey a line to the new 
mining region, into which men were pouring from the 
older parts of Canada and from our country. It was 
understood by them that they were to hit upon the 
most direct and at the same time the least expensive 
route for the railroad to take. They went to the 
scene of their labors by canoes, and carried tents, 
blankets, instruments, and what they called their 
" grub stakes," which is to say, their food. Then they 
travelled over the ground between their two terminal 
points, and back by another route, and back again by 
still another route, and so back and forth perhaps 
four and possibly six times. In that way alone were 
they enabled to select the line which offered the 
shortest length and the least obstacles in number and 
degree for the workmen who were to come after 
them. 

At Sproat's Landing I met an engineer, Mr. B. C. 
Stewart, who is famous in his profession as the most 
tireless and intrepid exponent of its diflficulties in the 
Dominion. The young men account it a misfortune 
to be detailed to go on one of his journeys with him. 
It is his custom to start out with a blanket, some 
bacon and meal, and a coffee-pot, and to be gone for 
weeks, and even for months. There scarcely can have 
been a hardier Scotchman, one of more simple tastes 
and requirements, or one possessing in any higher 
degree the quality called endurance. He has spent 
years in the mountains of British Columbia, finding 
and exploring the various passes, the most direct and 
feasible routes to and from them, the valleys between 
the ranges, and the characteristics of each section of 




ENGINEER ON THE PRELIMINARY SURVEY 



DAN DUNN S OUTFIT 305 

the country. In a vast country that has not other- 
wise been one -third explored he has made himself 
familiar with the full southern half. He has not 
known what it was to enjoy a home, nor has he seen 
an apple growing upon a tree in many years. During 
his long and close-succeeding trips he has run the 
whole gamut of the adventures incident to the lives 
of hunters or explorers, suffering hunger, exposure, 
peril from wild beasts, and all the hair-breadth escapes 
from frost and storm and flood that Nature unvan- 
quished visits upon those who first brave her depths. 
Such is the work and such are the men that fiQ^ure 
in the foremost preliminaries to railroad building. 

Whoever has left the beaten path of travel or gone 
beyond a well-settled region can form a more or less 
just estimate of that which one of these professional 
pioneers encounters in prospecting for a railroad. I 
had several " tastes," as the Irish express it, of that 
very Kootenay Valley. I can say conscientiously that 
I never was in a wilder region. In going only a few 
yards from the railroad " right of w^ay " the difficulties 
of an experienced pedestrianism like my own in- 
stantly became tremendous. There was a particular- 
ly choice spot for fishing at a distance of three-quar- 
ters of a mile from Dan Dunn's outfit, and I travelled 
the road to it half a dozen times. Bunyan would 
have strengthened the Pilgrims Progress had he 
known of such conditions with which to surround 
his hero. Between rocks the size of a city mansion 
and unsteady bowlders no larger than a man's head 
the ground was all but covered. Among this wreckage 
trees grew in wild abundance, and countless trunks 



3o6 ON Canada's frontier 

of dead ones lay rotting between them. A jungle as 
dense as any I ever saw was formed of soft-wood sap- 
lings and bushes, so that it was next to impossible to 
move a yard in any direction. It was out of the 
question for any one to see three yards ahead, and 
there was often no telling when a foot was put down 
whether it was going through a rotten trunk or upon 
a spinning bowlder, or whether the black shadows 
here and there were a foot deep or were the mouths 
of fissures that reached to China. I fished too long 
one night, and was obliged to make that journey after 
dark. After ten minutes crowded with falls and false 
steps, the task seemed so hopelessly impossible that 
I could easily have been induced to turn back and 
risk a night on the rocks at the edge of the tide. 

It was after a thorough knowledge of the natural 
conditions which the railroad men were overcoming 
that the gradual steps of their progress became most 
interesting. The first men to follow the engineers, 
after the specifications have been drawn up and the 
contracts signed, are the " right-of-way " men. These 
are partly trail-makers and partly laborers at the 
heavier work of actually clearing the wilderness for 
the road-bed. The trail-cutters are guided by the long 
line of stakes with which the engineers have marked 
the course the road is to take. The trail -men are 
sent out to cut what in general parlance would be 
called a path, over which supplies are to be thereafter 
carried to the workmen's camps. The path they cut 
must therefore be sufficiently wide for the passage 
alons it of a mule and his load. As a mule's load 
will sometimes consist of the framework of a kitchen 



DAN DUNN S OUTFIT 307 

range, or the end boards of a bedstead, a five-foot 
swath throucfh the forest is a trail of serviceable 

O 

width. The trail-cutters fell the trees to rio^ht and 
left, and drag the fallen trunks out of the path as 
they go along, travelling and working between a mile 
and two miles each day, and moving their tents and 
provisions on pack-horses as they advance. They 
keep reasonably close to the projected line of the 
railway, but the path they cut is apt to be a winding 
one that avoids the larger rocks and the smaller 
ravines. Great distortions, such as hills or gullies, 
which the railroad must pass through or over, the trail 
men pay no heed to; neither do the pack-horses, whose 
tastes are not consulted, and who can cling to a rock 
at almost any angle, like flies of larger growth. This 
trail, when finished, leads from the company's store- 
house all along the line, and from that storehouse, on 
the backs of the pack-animals, come all the food and 
tools and clothing, powder, dynamite, tents, and living 
utensils, to be used by the workmen, their bosses,, 
and the engineers. 

Slowly, behind the trail-cutters, follow the " right- 
of-way" men. These are axemen also. All that they 
do is to cut the trees down and drag them out of the 
way. 

It is when the axemen have cleared the rigrht of 
way that the first view of the railroad in embryo is 
obtainable. And very queer it looks. It is a wide 
avenue through the forest, to be sure, yet it is little 
like any forest drive that we are accustomed to in the 
realms of civilization. 

Every succeeding stage of the work leads towards. 



3o8 



ON CANADA S FRONTIER 



the production of an even and level 
thoroughfare, without protuberance or 
depression, and in the course of our 

ride to Dan 
Dunn's camp 
on the Koo- 
tenay we saw 
the rapidl}^ 
devel oping 
railroad in 
each phase 
of its evolu- 
tion from the 
rough surface 
of the wilder- 
ness. Now 
we would 
come upon a 
long reach of 
finished road- 
bed on com- 
pa ra t ively 
level ground 
all ready for 
the rails, with 
carpenters at work in little gullies which they were 
spanning with timber trestles. Next we would see a 
battalion of men and dump-carts cutting into a hill 
of dirt and carting its substance to a neighboring 
valley, wherein they were slowly heaping a long and 
symmetrical wall of earth -work, with sloping sides 
and level top, to bridge the gap between hill and hill. 




FALLING MONARCHS 



DAN DUNN S OUTFIT 309 

Again, we came upon places where men ran towards 
us shouting that a " blast " was to be fired. Here 
w^as what was called " rock work," where some granite 
rib of a mountain or huge rocky knoll was being 
blow^n to flinders with dynamite. 

And so, through all these scenes upon the pack- 
trail, we came at last to a white camp of tents hidden 
in the lush greenery of a luxuriant forest, and nestling 
beside a rushing mountain torrent of green water 
flecked with the foam from an eternal battle with a 
myriad of sunken rocks. It was Dunn's headquar- 
ters — the construction camp. Evening was falling, 
and the men were clambering down the hill-side trails 
from their work. There was no order in the disposi- 
tion of the tents, nor had the forest been prepared for 
them. Their white sides rose here and there wher- 
ever there was a space between the trees, as if so 
many great white moths had settled in a garden. 
Huge trees had been felled and thrown across ravines 
to serve as aerial foot-paths from point to point, and 
at the river's edge two or three tents seemed to have 
been pushed over the steep bluff to find lodgement on 
the sandy beach beside the turbulent stream. 

There were other camps on the line of this work, 
and it is worth while to add a word about their man- 
agement and the system under which they were main- 
tained. In the first place, each camp is apt to be 
the outfit of a contractor. The whole work of build- 
ing a railroad is let out in contracts for portions of 
five, ten, or fifteen miles. Even when great jobs of 
seventy or a hundred miles are contracted for in one 
piece, it is customary for the contractor to divide his 



310 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

task and sublet it. But a fairly representative bit of 
mountain work is that which I found Dan Dunn 
superintending, as, the factotum of the contractor who 
undertook it. 

If a contractor acts as " boss " himself, he stays 
upon the ground ; but in this case the contractor had 
other undertakings in hand. Hence the presence of 
Dan Dunn, his walking boss or general foreman. 
Dunn is a man of means, and is himself a contractor 
by profession, who has worked his way up from a 
start as a laborer. 

The camp to which we came was a portable city, 
complete except for its lack of women. It had its 
artisans, its professional men, its store and workshops, 
its seat of government and officers, and its policeman, 
its amusement hall, its work-a-day and social sides. 
Its main peculiarity was that its boss (for it was like 
an American city in the possession of that function- 
ary also) had announced that he was going to move 
it a couple of miles away on the following Sunday. 
One tent was the stableman's, with a capacious " cor- 
ral " fenced in near by for the keeping of the pack 
horses and mules. His corps of assistants was a 
large one ; for, besides the pack-horses that connected 
the camp with the outer world, he had the keeping of 
all the " grade-horses," so called — those which draw 
the stone and dirt carts and the little dump-cars on 
the false tracks set up on the levels near where " fill- 
ing" or "cutting" is to be done. Another tent was 
the blacksmith's. He had a " helper," and was a busy 
man, charged with all the tool-sharpening, the care of 
all the horses' feet, and the repairing of all the iron- 



DAN DUNN S OUTFIT 



3" 



work of the wagons, cars, 
and dirt -scrapers. Near 
by was the harness-man's 
tent, the shop of the leath- 
er-mender. In the centre 
of the camp, h'ke a low 
citadel, rose a mound of 
logs and earth bearing on 
a sign the single word 
" Powder," but containing 
within its great sunken 
chamber a considerable 
store of various explo- 
sives — giant, black, and 
Judson powder, and dyna- 
mite. 

More tremendous force 
is used in railroad blasting 
than most persons imag- 
ine. In order to perform 
a quick job of removing a 
section of solid mountain, 
the drill-men, after making 
a bore, say, twenty feet in 
depth, begin what they call 
"springing" it by explod- 
ing little cartridges in the bottom of the drill hole 
until they have produced a considerable chamber 
there. The average amount of explosive for which 
they thus prepare a place is 40 or 50 kegs of giant 
powder and 10 kegs of black powder; but Dunn 
told me he had seen 280 kegs of black powder and 




DAN DUNN ON HIS WORKS 



312 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

500 pounds of dynamite used in a single blast in 
mountain work. 

Another tent ^yas that of the time-keeper. He jour- 
neyed twice a day all over the work, five miles up 
and five down. On one journey he noted what men 
were at labor in the forenoon, and on his return he 
tallied those who were entitled to pay for the second 
half of the day. Such an official knows the name of 
every laborer, and, moreover, he knows the pecuniary 
rating of each man, so that when the workmen stop 
him to order shoes or trousers, blankets, shirts, to-^ 
bacco, penknives, or what not, he decides upon his 
own responsibility whether they have sufficient money 
coming to them to meet the accommodation. 

The " store " was simply another tent. In it was 
kept a fair supply of the articles in constant demand 
— a supply brought from the headquarters store at 
the other end of the trail, and constantly replenished 
by the pack-horses. This trading-place was in charge 
of a man called " the book-keeper," and he had two 
or three clerks to assist him. The stock was pre- 
cisely like that of a cross-roads country store in one 
of our older States. Its goods included simple medi- 
cines, boots, shoes, clothing, cutlery, tobacco, cigars, 
pipes, hats and caps, blankets, thread and needles, 
and several hundred others among the ten thousand 
necessaries of a modern laborer's life. The only legal 
tender received there took the shape of orders written 
by the time-keeper, for the man in charge of the store 
was not required to know the ratings of the men 
upon the pay-roll. 

The doctor's tent was among the rest, but his office 








"^^J- 






DAN DUNNS OUTFIT 315 

might aptly have been said to be " in the saddle." He 
was nominally employed by the company, but each 
man was " docked," or charged, seventy-five cents a 
month for medical services whether he ever needed a 
doctor or not. When I was in the camp there was 
only one sick man — a rheumatic. He had a tent all 
to himself, and his meals were regularly carried to 
him. Though he was a stranger to every man there, 
and had worked only one day before he surrendered 
to sickness, a purse of about forty dollars had been 
raised for him among the men, and he was to be 
*' packed " to Sproat's Landing on a mule at the com- 
pany's expense whenever the doctor decreed it wise 
to move him. Of course invalidism of a more serious 
nature is not infrequent where men work in the paths 
of sliding rocks, beneath caving earth, amid falling 
forest trees, around giant blasts, and with heavy tools. 

Another one of the tents was that of the " boss 
packer." He superintended the transportation of sup- 
plies on the pack-trail. This " job of 200 men," as 
Dunn styled his camp, employed thirty pack horses 
and mules. The pack-trains consisted of a " bell- 
horse " and boy, and six horses following. Each 
animal was rated to carry a burden of 400 pounds of 
dead weight, and to require three quarts of meal three 
times a day. 

Another official habitation was the " store-man's " 
tent. As a rule, there is a store-man to every ten 
miles of construction work ; often every camp has 
one. The store-man keeps account of the distribu- 
tion of the supplies of food. He issues requisitions 
upon the head storehouse of the company, and makes 



3i6 ON Canada's frontier 

out orders for each day's rations from the camp store. 
The cooks are therefore under him, and this fact sue- 
gests a mention of the principal building in the camp 
— the mess hall, or "grub tent." 

This structure was of a size to accommodate two 
hundred men at once. Two tables ran the length of 
the unbroken interior — tables made roughly of the 
slabs or outside boards from a saw-mill. The benches 
were huge tree - trunks spiked fast upon stumps. 
There was a bench on either side of each table, and 
the places for the men were each set with a tin cup 
and a tin pie plate. The bread was heaped high on 
wooden platters, and all the condiments — catsup, 
vinegar, mustard, pepper, and salt — were in cans that 
had once held condensed milk. The cooks worked 
in an open-ended extension at the rear of the great 
room. The rule is to have one cook and two 
" cookees " to each sixty men. 

While I was a new arrival just undergoing intro- 
duction, the men, who had come in from work, and 
who had " washed up " in the little creeks and at the 
river bank, began to assemble in the " grub tent " for 
supper. They were especially interesting to me be- 
cause there was every reason to believe that they 
formed an assembly as typical of the human flotsam 
of the border as ever was gathered on the continent. 
Very few were what might be called born laborers ; 
on the contrary, they were mainly men of higher ori- 
gin who had failed in older civilizations ; outlaws 
from the States; men who had hoped for a gold-mine 
until hope was all but dead ; men in the first flush of 
the gold fever ; ne er-do-wells ; and here and there a 



DAN DUNN S OUTFIT 



17 



working-man by training. They ate as a good many 
other sorts of men do, with great rapidity, little eti- 
quette, and just enough unselfishness to pass each 
other the bread. It was noticeable that they seemed 
to have no time for talking. Certainly they had 
earned the right to be hungry, and the food was good 
and plentiful. 




"^v ) ! 










A SKETCH ON THE WORK 



Dan Dunn's tent was just in front of the mess 
tent, a few feet away on the edge of the river bluff. 
It was a little "A" tent, with a single cot on one side, 
a wooden chest on the other, and a small table be- 
tween the two at the farther end, opposite the door. 

" Are ye looking at my wolverenes ?'' said he. 
*' There's good men among them, and some that ain't 
so good, and many that's worse. But railroading is 



3l8 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

good enough for most of 'em. It ain't too rich for 
any man's blood, I assure ye." 

Over six feet in height, broad-chested, athletic, and 
carrying not an ounce of flesh that could be spared, 
Dan Dunn's was a striking figure even where phys- 
ical strength was the most serviceable possession of 
every man. From never having given his personal 
appearance a thought — except during a brief period 
of courtship antecedent to the establishment of a 
home in old Ontario — he had so accustomed himself 
to unrestraint that his habitual attitude was that of a. 
long-bladed jack-knife not fully opened. His long 
spare arms swung limberly before a long spare body 
set upon long spare legs. His costume was one that 
is never described in the advertisements of city cloth- 
iers. It consisted of a dust -coated slouch felt hat, 
which a dealer once sold for black, of a flannel shirt, 
of homespun trousers, of socks, and of heavy " bro-^ 
gans." In all, his dress was what the aesthetes of Mr. 
Wilde's day might have aptly termed a symphony in 
dust. His shoes and hat had acquired a mud-color,, 
and his shirt and trousers were chosen because they 
originally possessed it. Yet Dan Dunn was dis- 
tinctly a cleanly man, fond of frequent splashing in 
the camp toilet basins — the Kootenay River and its 
little rushing tributaries. He was not shaven. As- 
a rule he is not, and yet at times he is, as it happens. 
I learned that on Sundays, when there was nothing 
to do except to go fishing, or to walk over to the en- 
gineer's camp for intellectual society, he felt the un- 
conscious impulse of a forgotten training, and put on 
a coat. He even tied a black silk ribbon under his- 



DAN DUNN S OUTFIT 



319 



collar on such occasions, and if no one had given 
him a good cigar during the week, he took out his 
best pipe (which had been locked up, because what- 
ever was not under lock and key was certain to be 
stolen in half an hour). Then he felt fitted, as he 
would say, " for a hard day s work at loafing." 

If you came upon Dan Dunn on Broadway, he 
would look as awkward as any other animal removed 
from its element ; yet on a forest trail not even Davy 
Crockett was handsomer or more picturesque. His 
face is reddish-brown and as hard-skinned as the top 
of a drum, befitting a man who has lived out-of-doors 
all his life. But it is a finely moulded face, instinct 
with good-nature and some gentleness. The witch- 
ery of quick Irish humor lurks often in his eyes, but 




THE MESS TEN! Al NIGHT 



320 ON CANADA S FRONTIER 

can quickly give place on occasion to a firm light, 
which is best read in connection with the broad, 
strong sweep of his massive under-jaw. There you 
see his fitness to command small armies, even of 
what he calls " wolverenes." He is willing to thrash 
any man who seems to need the operation, and yet 
he is equally noted for gathering a squad of rough 
laborers in every camp to make them his w^ards. He 
collects the money such men earn, and puts it in 
bank, or sends it to their families. 

" It does them as much good to let me take it as 
to chuck it over a gin-mill bar," he explained. 

As we stood looking into the crowded booth, 
where the men sat elbow to elbow, and all the knife 
blades were plying to and from all the plates and 
mouths, Dunn explained that his men were well fed. 
" The time has gone by," said he, " when you could 
keep an outfit on salt pork and bacon. It's as far 
gone as them days when they say the Hudson Bay 
Company fed its laborers on rabbit tracks and a stick. 
Did ye never hear of that } Why, sure, man, 'twas 
only fifty years ago that when meal hours came the 
bosses of the big trading company would give a 
workman a stick, and point out some rabbit tracks, 
and tell him he'd have an hour to catch his fill. But 
in railroading nowadays we give them the best that's 
going, and all they want of it — beef, ham, bacon, po- 
tatoes, mush, beans, oatmeal, the choicest fish, and 
game right out of the woods, and every sort of vege- 
table (canned, of course). Oh, they must be fed well, 
or they wouldn't stay." 

He said that the supplies of food are calculated on 



DAN DUNNS OUTFIT 32 1 

the basis of three-and-a-half pounds of provisions to 
a man — all the varieties of food being proportioned 
so that the total weight will be three -and- a -half 
pounds a day. The orders are given frequently and 
for small amounts, so as to economize in the number 
of horses required on the pack-trail. The amount to 
be consumed by the horses is, of course, included in 
the loads. The cost of " packing " food over long 
distances is more considerable than would be sup- 
posed. It was estimated that at Dunn's camp the 
freighting cost forty dollars a ton, but I heard of 
places farther in the mountains where the cost was 
double that. Indeed, a discussion of the subject 
brought to light the fact that in remote mining 
camps the cost of "packing" brought lager-beer in 
bottles up to the price of champagne. At one camp 
on the Kootenay bacon was selling at the time I 
was in the valley at thirty cents a pound, and dried 
peaches fetched forty cents under competition. 

As we looked on, the men were eating fresh beef 
and vegetables, with tea and coffee and pie. The 
head cook was a man trained in a lumber camp, and 
therefore ranked high in the scale of his profession. 
Every sort of cook drifts into camps like these, and 
that camp considers itself the most fortunate which 
happens to eat under the ministrations of a man who 
has cooked on a steamboat ; but a cook from a lum- 
ber camp is rated almost as proudly. 

"Ye would not think it," said Dunn, "but some of 
them men has been bank clerks, and there's doctors 
and teachers among 'em — ^everything, in fact, except 
preachers. I never knew a preacher to get into a 




"THEY GAINED ERECTNESS BY SLOW JOLTS " 



railroad gang. 
The men are 
always chang- 
— coming 
and going. 
We don't have 
to advertise 
for new hands. 
The woods is 
full of men out 
of a job, and 
out of everything — pockets, elbows, and all. They 
drift in like peddlers on a pay-day. They come here 
with no more clothing than will wad a gun. The 
most of them will get nothing after two months' 
work. You see, they're mortgaged with their fares 
against them (thirty to forty dollars for them which 
the railroad brings from the East), and then they have 
their meals to pay for, at five dollars a week while 
they're here, and on top of that is all the clothing 
and shoes and blankets and tobacco, and everything 
they need — all charged agin them. It's just as well 



DAN DUNN S OUTFIT 323 

for them, for the most of them are too rich if they're 
a dollar ahead. There's few of them can stand the 
luxury of thirty dollars. When they get a stake of 
them dimensions, the most of them will stay no 
.longer after pay-day than John Brown stayed in 
heaven. The most of them bang it all away for 
drink, and they are sure to come back again, but the 
' prospectors ' and chronic tramps only work to get 
clothes and a flirting acquaintance with food, as well 
as money enough to make an afridavit to, and they 
never come back again at all. Out of 8500 men 
we had in one big work in Canada, 1500 to 2000 
knocked off every month. Ninety per cent, came 
back. They had just been away for an old-fashioned 
drunk." 

It would be difificult to draw a parallel between 
these laborers and any class or condition of men in 
the East. They were of every nationality where news 
of gold-mines, of free settlers' sections, or of quick 
fortunes in the New World had penetrated. I rec- 
ognized Greeks, Finns, Hungarians, Danes, Scotch, 
English, Irish, and Italians among them. Not a man 
exhibited a coat, and all were tanned brown, and 
were as spare and slender as excessively hard work 
can make a man. There was not a superfluity or an 
ornament in sight as they walked past me ; not a 
necktie, a finger-ring, nor a watch-chain. There were 
some very intelligent faces and one or two fine ones 
in the band. Two typical old-fashioned prospectors 
especially attracted me. They were evidently of 
gentle birth, but time and exposure had bent them, 
and silvered their long, unkempt locks. Worse than 



324 



ON CANADA S FRONTIER 



all, it had planted in their faces a blended expression 
of sadness and hope fatigued that was painful to see. 
It is the brand that is on every old prospector's face. 
A very few of the men were young fellows of thirty, 
or even within the twenties. Their youth impelled 
them to break away from the table earlier than the 
others, and, seizing their rods, to start off for the fish- 
ino: in the river. 

But those who thought of active pleasure were few 
indeed. Theirs was killing work, the most severe 
kind, and performed under the broiling sun, that at 
hio-h mountain altitudes sends the mercury above 
1 00° on every summer's day, and makes itself felt as 
if the rarefied atmosphere was no atmosphere at all. 
After a long day at the drill or the pick or shovel in 
such a climate, it was only natural that the men 
should, with a common impulse, seek first the solace 
of their pipes, and then of the shake-downs in their 
tents. I did not know until the next morning how 
severely their systems were strained ; but it happened 
at sunrise on that dky that I was at my ablutions 
on the edge of the river when Dan Dunn's gong 
turned the silent forest into a bedlam. It was called 
the seven-o'clock alarum, and was rung two hours 
earlier than that hour, so that the men might take 
two hours after dinner out of the heat of the day, 
" else the sun would kill them," Dunn said. This 
was apparently his device, and he kept up the trans- 
parent deception by having every clock and watch 
in the camp set two hours out of time. 

With the sounding of the gong the men began to 
appear outside the little tents in which they slept in 



DAN DUNN S OUTFIT 



325 



couples. They came stumbling down the bluff to 
wash in the river, and of all the pitiful sights I ever 
saw, they presented one of the worst ; of all the 
straining and racking and exhaustion that ever hard 
labor gave to men, they exhibited the utmost. They 
were but half awakened, and they moved so painfully 
and stiffly that I imagined I could hear their bones 
creak. I have seen spavined work-horses turned out 
to die that moved precisely as these men did. It was 
shocking to see them hobble over the rough ground ; 
it was pitiful to watch them as they attempted to 
straighten their stiffened bodies after they had been 
bent double over the water. They gained erectness 
by slow jolts, as if their joints were of iron that had 
rusted. Of course they soon regained whatever elas- 
ticity nature had left them, and were themselves for 
the day — an active, muscular force of men. But that 
early morning sight of them was not such a spectacle 
as a right-minded man enjoys seeing his fellows take 
part in. 



THE END 



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